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When Sirius was around six or seven, he fell out of a tree and into a blackberry bush.
He hadn’t done much tree-climbing as a child, considering they lived in what was largely a brick and stone city strip. But they had once been shipped off to a great-aunt’s whilst their parents managed some sort of top-secret and probably-evil affairs back home, and the property that he and his little brother had stayed at had been surrounded by forest.
Perhaps they should have known he’d be a Gryffindor, because as soon as their great-aunt had gotten bored of the two of them, Sirius had been out the back doors and into the unfamiliar woods.
Scaling the thicker branches at the bottom had been easy. Falling from the thin ones at the top had been even easier. He felt rather than heard the branch under his small body snap, and he can still recall the stomach-drop feeling of freefall as he tumbled ungracefully downwards. A patch of blackberry vines broke his fall, ripe berries bursting open and staining his skin and clothes as the thorns dug into fabric and flesh, ensnaring him entirely. Bright red blood mixed with the pinkish purple juice as he struggled and strained. His hair caught, the ends and roots snagged on the spikes.
Regulus, who had been watching from the windows, had run towards him with a pair of kitchen shears in his little hands and Sirius had kicked and bucked and fought four times harder to free himself from the vines before his little brother would have to cut his hair free. It hadn’t even been that long, back then, roughly the same length as Regulus’ is now.
He had managed to yank himself out of the brambles before his hair needed to be cut, and he can remember the sheer relief that had flooded his body even as he limped back towards the house with his brother in tow.
He had gotten lucky, that time. He hadn’t known it then.
But now, sixteen and trailing dark blood into the snow as he staggers towards the Potters’ doorstep with cold wind biting into his shaved head, it seems that his luck has run out.
For all of his preening and peacocking around Hogwarts, Sirius has never spent so much time looking at his own reflection as he has in the last twenty-four hours. It’s a really nice mirror, which helps, honestly. It’s got an antique-looking bronze frame with an intricately carved pattern of leaves and berries and trees. The Potters must import their wall decor. Lovely. It makes an excellent distraction from his reflection.
James is watching him now from a bed away, concern written on his face like blood in the snow. Like lights on a tree. He’s a good friend, but Sirius is fine.
“It’s just hair,” he murmurs, and he drops his hand from his scalp. It takes more effort than it probably should to tear his gaze away and turn around. And he’s right, is the thing, but he also isn’t .
He’s always been a bit of a dramatic bitch, but showing up unannounced to the Potters’ doorstep on Christmas evening and bleeding out on their parlor rug like a wounded wet cat with his long hair shorn off was a whole new degree. He should have been more upset about the curses, the cuts, the bruises. Not something as silly and as vain as his hair .
And yet.
Sirius has always been beautiful—always been pretty, been attractive, been desirable. He leans into it, to the comments and the gossip and the compliments and insults alike. He prides himself on his appearance, and his hair most of all. Growing it out long had been the tiniest, earliest act of rebellion aside from being sorted into Gryffindor. He likes that it’s dark and thick and shiny, that it had stretched down past his shoulders and curled at the ends just so. He’d liked that it was long enough to be tied into braids when he’s gossiping with the girls, liked the way it settled around his ears and on his neck, liked the way it felt when Remus pulled on it just so.
And it’s gone, now.
The new cut isn’t horrendous , exactly. Honestly, he’s a little impressed that his mother was able to keep her hands so steady on the kitchen shears she had summoned when she had him frozen in place with an Imperio and bleeding onto her cold marble floors. She’d spelled it off permanently in the end, but that didn’t change his mind about her steady hand. It highlights the angles of his face, the sharpness of his cheekbones, the severity of his eyes. But it isn’t exactly showstopping, and it’s short . It isn’t like before. Nothing is like before.
(His picture on the Black family tapestry has short hair, as well. Or it had short hair. He is almost positive that the wall no longer features him at all. It doesn’t bother him in the same way that his hair doesn’t bother him—which is to say, it shouldn’t but it does. It really fucking does.)
“It’s really not that bad, Padfoot,” James attempts, his voice forcibly upbeat. “Besides. You’re much more than just your hair, and what matters is that you’re safe, now.”
Sirius nods. He doesn’t know what more there is to say.
Because his entrance had been so abrupt, Euphemia and Fleamont had quickly produced a bed and spare mattress and crammed it into James’ bedroom. They had assured him that they would work on moving him into the spare room they’d been using for storage in the morning. Sirius had borrowed some pajamas from James that were just barely too loose on him.
When he’d put them on, it had reminded him very suddenly and very strangely of Regulus. He pushed the thought out of his head as quickly as it came, but it still made him ache. His whole body and his heart, aching. He’d watched himself in the bathroom mirror as he brushed his teeth and then stared at himself in the mirror over James’ dresser for a long while.
“Are you tired?” James asks now, sitting in the middle of his bed facing Sirius with his back against the wall. Sirius can hear the worry in his tone, clear as day, and he can hear the lingering fury that had risen when he’d arrived.
And yeah, Sirius is tired . He’s always been tired and sick and tired, but he really doesn’t want to go to sleep. Perhaps he should feel safe here, in the Potter home where nothing has ever even threatened to hurt him. “Sure Yeah.”
He doesn’t fall asleep for hours—just stares out into the quiet dark.
Sirius wakes up the next morning in the Potter home, in a mattress crammed into James’ bedroom. It’s warm and familiar and full of happy memories. He lets himself wake up slow, basking in the late morning sunlight streaming in through James’ bedroom window to warm the pillow and sheets. He’s perfectly content until he remembers, reaching a lazy hand up to comb through his hair.
Ah . Right.
It is Regulus’ birthday, and for the first time in fourteen years, Sirius will not be there. He’s so sorry. He’s so sorry it feels like it’s going to burst out of him, like water from a dam. He’ll write a letter that he knows won’t make it to Regulus, but he will not go back. He can’t go back, and he has no idea whether to be happy or sad about that fact.
He tries and fails to sort through his thoughts, catalogs the soreness in his body—from the curses, from the release of tension for what feels like the first time ever—and lists the things he knows. It’s a trick he learned from Remus, a means of making big things feel smaller. More manageable.
One: Sirius is… alive. So that’s a start.
Two: Sirius is coping. To a certain extent. He’s working on it. James took the mirror off of the wall within the first four hours of his arrival, which, rude . He thinks that, all things considered, he’s doing a fucking fantastic job coping.
Mostly, he just—doesn't get out of bed. Effie brings his breakfast and lunch and dinner up and he only leaves his pile of blankets to move into his new room and burrow into the sheets all over again. The whole day, he can feel James and Effie and Monty all exchanging concerned looks over his head, but they mostly leave him be.
Only, he doesn’t really move on day two, either. Or day three.
Beyond meals and the scarce bathroom trip here and there, Sirius is just a lump under a blanket. He doesn’t cry or anything, just falls into a cycle of sleeping and breathing and staring off into the middle distance. He genuinely thinks he could just melt into the mattress and stay there forever, or maybe slip quietly between the floorboards and vanish.
He says as much to James on the night of the third day, just speaks it into the pitch darkness of his room. It’s illuminated only by the rectangle of light from the open door, blocked by James’ shadow as he lingers in the doorway. Worry pours off of him in waves.
James says, “I don’t want you to disappear.”
Sirius says, “I’ll try not to.”
There is a weary sigh—a helpless sort of sound—and the door shuts with a quiet click . Soon, Sirius knows, James will be dragging him out of bed and back into the sunlight. Soon, he will have to return to the real world. To school. To the pile of unanswered letters from Remus gathering on his new desk. Soon, he will have to get up.
But not yet. He’s too—he’s afraid .
The thing is, Sirius really stopped believing that the Sorting Hat had made a mistake about a day into his first year at Hogwarts. Bravery suited him well—he and all of his Gryffindor friends, unlike his Slytherin family members. Now, though, he can’t help but wonder.
Sirius is… scared.
Scared of of his fucking mind, out of his skin. He doesn’t even know what he’s afraid of, exactly. But the feeling overwhelms his system like a spell gone haywire, bouncing off of the walls of his skull and through his bones. At best, the fear rests under his skin, itchy and jumpy and anxious. At worst, it is a terror that is so jarring and so visceral that he feels like he’s going to come out of his skin. Everything is too much and everywhere and all at once.
Every time a dish breaks or a chair scrapes against the floor or Monty raises a hand to rest on Sirius’ shoulder—everything seems to set him off and send him back. He isn’t getting better. He’s supposed to be better.
He is watching the windows constantly. Listening for a knock at the door. Looking over his shoulder when a shadow passes behind him. Part of him wants to never be found. A smaller, stupid part of him doesn’t know anymore. And then there’s the James of it all.
James has been sad, lately. Sad since Sirius arrived.
It doesn’t suit James, the helpless sorrow on his face. Sirius is ashamed, incredibly so, to have put it there. He wonders whether James really is happy that Sirius came. He wonders if, perhaps, the Potters regret what they have gotten themselves into.
He thinks sometimes that they might wish he’d leave this house as well, so that they could have their lives back. He thinks sometimes about leaving—leaving with nowhere in the world to go. Just walking and walking and walking until he managed to somehow fall off of the earth. He’s always been good at defying expectations. For better or for worse.
“You seem…” James begins on the fourth day, sat at the end of the bed passing a Quaffle between his hands, and he trails off like he’s trying to figure out the best way to finish his sentence with the least amount of damage. Like he’s trying to navigate am active minefield. “Different.”
Sirius whispers, like he’s afraid of the question and its answer, “How long is it going to feel like this?”
“Oh, Pads, I don’t know,” James says defeatedly, and he flops over to lay his head on the pillow beside Sirius’. They stare at each other for a beat before James finds his words. “But I’ll be right here the whole time.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s me and you, remember? And,” James hesitates, “if there’s anything I can do—”
Sirius shakes his head immediately and watches his friend deflate into the mattress. James, he knows, doesn’t do well with nothing to do. He’s too compassionate for his own good, too eager to find a solution for every little problem that anyone ever has. And while Sirius believes that James can fix anything he truly puts his heart into, he also knows that there is no fixing what has broken this time. Sirius doesn’t have it in him to explain that there isn’t a way for James to solve this particular issue; that Sirius is the problem this time, and it would be a whole hell of a lot easier if James would give up on him already. But James would never—they’re well and truly stuck with each other: all of the right things in the world personified chained to Sirius, who is wrong .
Wrongness wraps around him like blackberry vines, crushes his ribcage into splinters that dig into his lungs and send his breaths hitching and faltering. Wrongness. Failure. Shame. Curling, twining tendrils wound as tightly as strands of DNA, forever embedded in the fiber of his very being. He was borne from evil, designed for darkness, raised by monsters.
What does that make him? He asks, one day, just before school is to start again, what James thinks of him. His friend takes him by the shoulders, his eyes deathly serious. “You are not a bad person, Sirius. You aren’t.”
“What am I, then?” He whispers.
His best friend doesn’t falter. “You are a good person, who bad things have happened to. And look at you. You’re—”
Sirius scoffs. “A train wreck with an awful haircut?”
“You’re still here . You’re still you, haircut and all,” James says, “and you’re still growing. We all are.”
He considers it. Growing. He feels like he’s been grown-up all his life already. How much more can he possibly do? How many growing pains can he take?
“We should decorate,” James says brightly, as if he can sense the fog in Sirius’ head and is trying to push it out with his sunshine. “How about a plant?”
Sirius pauses carefully—he’s been careful a lot lately, for someone so reckless. “I’m not big on plants.”
“Ah, right,” James winces. “A new blanket, then. How about red?”
Baby steps, Monty keeps telling him whenever they speak. Whenever he flinches. Whenever he says sorry, I’m so sorry, whenever he loses all of the progress he’s made. Baby steps, son.
It’s baby steps on brand-new legs, it’s clawing through blackberry thorns, it’s free-falling from a tree branch with nothing and no one below. His bruises have faded, but the fear has not. James is looking at him expectantly.
Sirius says, with a ghost of his old smile, “Red’s great.”
They’re back to Hogwarts after the holiday break is up, because school stops for no existential crisis. Sirius is being no less treated like a thing made of glass, though Effie and Monty try valiantly to hide their fluttering hands and concerned glances back and forth. They wave from the platform and Sirius tries to remind himself that they’ll be there again come summer—for him, too, this time. That someone will be waiting for him.
Lily and Marlene are the first to cross paths with him, before even Peter and Remus, while Sirius and James are making their way to their usual train compartment. They quite literally freeze in their tracks—the whole sorry lot of them, like a pack of startled meerkats—and stare for a long moment.
James says, jovial, “Evans!”
Lily blinks at them, once, twice, and then seems to shake herself. Her eyes skate over Sirius’ ducked head for barely a half of a second before she’s got her guard back up. “... Potter.”
“McKinnon,” Sirius grunts.
Marlene lifts an eyebrow—the scarred one—and replies, a little too casually, “Black. I like the… you look—”
“Thanks,” he cuts her off brusquely, and silence wades into the spaces between them all. They duck awkwardly around each other and into their respective compartments, where Sirius all-but collapses into his seat, face in his hands. “Oh, Merlin.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” James attempts brightly. “All things considered, it was actually quite good.”
Sirius jams the heels of his hands harder into his eyes as if he can gouge them out by sheer force of will. He’s still sat like that by the time Remus and Peter join them, the both of them going very, very quiet upon arrival.
Peter says, like he can’t help it, “… Sirius ?”
He feels rather than sees Peter and Remus plop onto the benches—Remus beside him and Peter across the way, beside James—and tentatively lifts his head.
“It’s not that bad,” James defends him, but it rubs Sirius the wrong way.
He grumbles, a little childishly, “I have a reputation .”
“Yeah, I mean, you were a bit of a slag before Remus,” Peter says, and then adds, thoughtful, “Or maybe… even after Remus. But it wasn’t because of the hair!”
Sirius cuts him off with a sigh. “Peter Pettigrew, are you trying to tell me that I have a great personality?”
Peter pauses. “Would it make this better or worse if I was?”
“Not sure yet.” Sirius says, his eyes narrow. “Keep going.”
“Let’s not,” James interjects, hands up with his palms facing out placatingly. “Maybe.”
Remus rolls his eyes at the whole lot of them, as if he isn’t equally as bad at times, and knocks his shoulder into Sirius’. “It really isn’t bad, you know.”
“I mean, you’re telling me you actually like this?” He scoffs, gesturing with one hand to all of him, lingering on his hair. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
Remus shrugs, every bit the swearing Muggleborn he is when he says, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m fucking saying.”
“You heard the man,” James laughs, and that’s the end of it.
That night when they all arrive back in their shared room, without really talking about it, the four of them push their bed frames up against the walls and float their mattresses to the middle of the floor. They load blankets and pillows and themselves—all piled on top of and around each other, like puppies or little kids at a sleepover. At some point in the night, Sirius turns over restlessly, and Remus is already looking at him, eyes tired but alert.
“Go to sleep,” Remus whispers to him, soothing and slow. “We’re right here.”
Sirius almost bristles. “I’m not scared.”
“Good. I think you’ve had enough scares for a lifetime,” Remus murmurs, low and sweet into the sliver of space between their bodies. They’re so close. Sirius still can’t believe it sometimes.
You terrify me , Sirius does not say. Instead, he says, “I don’t know how to do that. Move forward.”
“None of us do,” Remus snorts. “I mean… we’re all kids, still. We’ve got time before all of the big decisions need to happen.”
Sirius bumps his forehead against Remus’ shoulder gently. “And in the meantime?”
“We just grow,” says the love of all of his lives and every life to come.
They fall asleep like that, wrapped up together, white noise of sleepy talking and rumbling snores, like a chorus in the morning or a shield against the night.
The next day reunites him with his brother.
Regulus storms down the corridor towards him, green and black robes billowing out with the force and speed of his steps, and Sirius genuinely considers the implications of running the opposite way. It must show on his face as his little brother—not so little, now, fifteen —nears him, because Regulus snaps, “Don’t even think about it.”
“Happy birthday,” Sirius says, and then bites his tongue. He really is losing his mind. The Black family brand of crazy has finally seized him. Merlin.
Regulus lifts an eyebrow, entirely unimpressed. “Thanks. You look like shit.”
“Thanks,” Sirius echoes, dry, resisting the urge to run his hand over his scalp like he’s been doing practically nonstop since that night.
His brother sighs, short and irritated, and looks away furtively. His voice is low and rushed when he speaks next, like he’s trying to fast forward the conversation. “You could have written.”
“Think they would have let you read it?”
Regulus huffs, the tips of his ears pinkening. “Well. No. I thought she was going to kill you. I’m—I am glad that you’re okay. For the most part.”
“I went to James,” Sirius says, entirely unnecessary if the look he gets from Regulus has anything to say about it. “I think she would have killed me.”
“I know,” Regulus says, and he glances back at Sirius like he’s giving him an evaluation. Whatever he’s looking for, he must find it, because he’s turning to leave with an unreadable expression.
A memory strikes Sirius suddenly, like he’s watching a muggle film rather than staring at the back of his brother’s retreating head, clear and colorful and detailed. There had been an hourglass that used to sit on the fireplace mantle at Grimmauld Place, charmed to look like the ocean. One half held water and the other sand, and they would swirl together when the glass was turned upside down. It had belonged to some great uncle or cousin.
He and Regulus had been playing with it, when he was seven and Regulus five. His little brother had turned it once too roughly and it had slipped off of the mantle. Sirius had put his little hands out to catch it, only for the charmed glass to shatter into pieces in his palms.
Sand and water and blood had burst forth, and Regulus had been hysterical in front of him as Sirius struggled to cup his hands and save it all. It hadn’t mattered how hard he tried to hold on. It slipped right through his fingers, sand in his cuts and bloody water on the floors.
Watching Regulus go now feels strikingly similar, like he’s trying desperately to hold on to something precious. Like he can’t stop it as it slips away. He tries anyway: “Wait!”
His little brother turns around, expectant.
“Do you want me to come back?” Sirius offers weakly. He doesn’t know what else to say, to give. He doesn’t have anything else—his hands empty but for water and for blood.
Regulus rolls his eyes, strides back just close enough to smack him upside the head. “Don’t be stupid.”
Sirius knows he couldn’t go back even if he wanted to. Some bridges can’t be rebuilt. He begs every deity he can think of that the one that leads to Regulus never burns. He doesn’t know if either of them could survive the fall, the choppy waters below.
If Regulus drowns in it, he thinks with an unshakeable certainty, it will be my fault. I was supposed to teach him how to swim.
“You know that I’m,” he says haltingly, trying to string together a promise that isn’t just I love you I love you I love you , “I’m always going to be here for you if you need me. Even if you don’t. I just—I can’t be there anymore. But I’ll always be here. You know that, don’t you?”
Regulus looks to him with some mixture of pity and grief and knowing. Always knowing —Regulus, the youngest, the quietest, always standing just on the outer edge of the room and listening in. When they were small, Regulus used to perch halfway up the grand staircase and peek at their parents’ dinner guests through the gaps in the bannister. Sirius aches with the memory. “Yes. I know that.”
There’s a silence that stretches long and creeping between them, over the troubled water, over the broken pieces of the hourglass and the bridge that Sirius clings to. And then Regulus turns. And he goes.
Sirius watches him leave, a blur of black and green, and his heart cups its hands. Cradling. Clinging. Still here—always still here.
Sirius gets his first detention after moving in with James on the night of a full moon. It’s honestly blessedly familiar—he would take it with mischievous pride if it weren’t for the whole furry-little-problem. He maintains that he technically didn’t do anything wrong, and he fumes about it as he makes his way to Sprout’s office to contest it. Remus hadn’t even been mad at him about it, which made matters a million times worse. What the fuck was the point of becoming an Animagus if he couldn’t be there on the nights Remus needed him? He was going to kill Professor Sprout and all of her stupid plants.
But, then, that was what earned him the detention in the first place, so it would perhaps not actually help him. It’d just make him feel a teeny tiny bit better.
He’d never liked Herbology anyway—he was quite horrendous at identifying various plants and assigning uses to each of them. The whole class had been assigned a planter of foxgloves, three to a student. All they had to do was keep them alive for the duration of two weeks, but it turns out that not showing up to class for the majority of those two weeks tends to leave a flower a little worse for wear.
On the days he had been there, he’d tried his best to recover the lost time, but there was no bringing them back. When he’d been forced up to the front of the room to present his entirely dead plants, he’d simply declared them a prime example of the Black family ability to poison whatever they touch.
Ergo: detention.
He lifts a fist to knock on the dark wood door of Sprout’s office but it swings open before he can even make contact. Pomona Sprout beams at him. “Ah, Mister Black!”
Sirius tries not to flinch at the name, which it stupid. For better or for worse, it is his name. He shakes it off, brushing past a cheery Professor Sprout and into her office. The space is full of plants—floor to ceiling, all over the walls and shelves and her desk. It’s almost… it’s really cool-looking, in a cluttered and colorful way. His home never had much life at all, let alone such an abundance of it.
“What brings you by, then?” Professor Sprout asks, rounding her desk to plop down in a vine-covered seat.
Sirius huffs out a frustrated breath, the kind that used to blow his hair out of his face. “I can’t have detention tonight.”
“Ah,” Pomona says, “and is there any particular reason why not?”
He wants to shove the little potted silverweed off of the side of her desk like a particularly petty housecat. He’s not sure he’d have the energy to. Instead, he grits his teeth and forces out, “I just can’t. Is—can we move it to a different day? Or could I just make up the assignment?”
“I’m afraid the window of opportunity for the foxgloves has passed,” Professor Sprout frowns, drumming her fingers over top of a first edition Herbology lexicon in front of her. “My decision from earlier still stands. Your plans tonight will just have to wait.”
Tell that to an eight-foot werewolf, Sirius almost snaps. She might know about Remus, but he certainly wasn’t supposed to. And on top of that, the whole don’t-worry-about-my-safety and I-can-turn-into-a-dog wasn’t exactly allowed, either. “Look, I’ll grow any damn flowers you want, or any other thing you want me to bury in soil and stare at for weeks—just let me off the hook tonight.”
“That’s quite the offer!” Sprout exclaims, looking all-too pleased. She pushes the book aside, leans forward on her elbows so that the two of their faces are less than a foot apart. “Tell me, Mister Black, do you know why your foxgloves did not survive?”
He really isn’t good at Herbology. A dead plant is a dead plant, and his were most certainly dead. “I guess I just didn’t really… care.”
“Quite the opposite,” Professor Sprout murmurs, something mischievous and excited dancing in her eyes. She pulls back and digs around in one of the massive drawers of her desk, producing a familiar box. His dead foxglove flowers droop, wilted and discolored. “I inspected your plot after your presentation. These plants were over watered, not under.”
Sirius blinks. “If this is a metaphor, you’ve lost me.”
“Who said anything about metaphor?” She asks, innocently. Her tone screams this is a metaphor . “Although, I do always say that any plant lesson is a life lesson in its own right, don’t I?”
He hates Herbology. He must really fucking love Remus.
Pomona goes on blithely, “Only someone who cares perhaps too much might overwater rather than under. What do you think of that?”
“What difference does it make if I cared about them too much or too little?” Sirius snaps, his patience thinning. “They still died.”
Professor Sprout just levels him with a neutral expression. “That’s an interesting question, Mister Black. Tell me, what difference does it make to a growing life if a caretaker cares about it too much or not at all?”
And that, well. Merlin. That’s unfair, isn’t it?
“So, you want me to try again? With the foxgloves,” Sirius plows forward, gesturing to the sad little plant. If he guilted his friends into sharing custody of the thing, he could probably get it to last a week. He reaches across the desk to grab it.
Pomona swats his hand out of the air. “Not so fast, Mister Black! You will not be redoing this assignment. I have a new one for you.”
She leans over to rummage through her desk drawer, floating a little clay pot and filling it with charmed soil. The pot is placed in Sirius’ waiting hands and Pomona produces a teeny-tiny spring green sprout is planted in the center. She pops back up into her chair and smiles brightly. “Now. Water, sunlight, a nice and neutral temperature. And once a day, you will say this enchantment over the pot; crescunt quod intus. ”
“ Crescunt quod intus ,” he echoes tiredly, cradling the little pot in his hands. “What is it, exactly?”
Sprout grins at him, her wand back out and the massive Herbology book on her desk flipping to the page she’d left off on as the plants tentatively begin to move again. It seems their meeting has ended as she says, “Why don’t we wait and see? You will report here, once every week, and we will track the progress of this little dear.”
“Of course,” Sirius grumbles. “I love it when people are cryptic. And if it doesn’t grow?”
“It will grow, Mister Black, that I can assure you,” she promises firmly, as the door pushes open and Sirius backs out into the hall again. “All things do. Consider that detention stricken!”
When he gets back to their dorm, James tilts his head, curious. “What’s with the plant?”
“Just the only way I could get out of detention,” Sirius grumbles, though he carries the pot over to his windowsill like he’s carrying something precious and sets it down like it’s made of glass. “Are we going or what?”
They go into the woods, the four of them, and they become very briefly something new. The plant soaks in the full moon’s light, and in the morning, the sun rises on them all.
Barty Crouch Jr. is the first one brave enough, stupid enough, Barty enough to say something about the elephant on Sirius’ head. He’s walking with Regulus and Evan and they pass Sirius in one of the halls and he whistles long and low. “Merlin, Black, you do that yourself?”
On his right, Evan elbows him harshly. “Mate.”
Barty either doesn’t hear him or decidedly ignores him, even as Regulus’ eyes flash over to him with venom. Barty crows, cackling, “Looking like the backend of a werewolf!”
Sirius freezes in his tracks.
He’s still frozen as Regulus’s gaze darkens and as his little brother whirls around on his heels, his arm a blur of black and green as he smacks Barty sharply across the face. “Don’t you fucking dare,” he hisses, like a cat with the hair on its spine sticking up. “What did I tell you?”
Barty recovers from the blow and he and Evan and Regulus turn to look at Sirius again. Their eyes are wide and nervous. Everything is incredibly still.
Barty says, slowly, as if realizing he’s committed some sort of atrocious error. “Mate, I’m—I didn’t mean to, like, trigger you or anything—”
“Shut up , Barty,” Evan and Regulus say in unison. Regulus stares at him warily. “Sirius…?”
Sirius unfreezes, and he just. He starts laughing.
It’s slow and halting, at first, but it builds and builds and builds until he’s hysterical, until he’s shaking with it. The three Slytherins look even more alarmed and he wraps his arms around his middle and howls with laughter, tears gathering in his eyes. His breathing is picking up, chest stuttering, still just laughing and laughing.
Oh, Merlin, he thinks distantly, I’m really fucking losing it.
He hardly registers it when cold hands encircle one of his forearms, when he’s being tugged out of the middle of the hall and into an empty classroom, when the door is shut behind him and he’s forcibly sat down onto the floor. Regulus murmurs under his breath, “What’s happening?”
And that’s. That’s the joke, isn’t it? That’s the punchline that he’s laughing at, that he’s been laughing at. What the fuck is happening?
He isn’t laughing anymore, but tears continue to fall. His breaths continue to hitch. His hands fly up to press into his eyes as if they can stop whatever it is that’s occurring. Some sort of breakdown, he figures. It was bound to happen.
In the end, it’s Regulus who pulls him out of the spiral. Regulus who wraps clumsy and hesitant arms around his shaking shoulders, Regulus who awkwardly pats him twice on the back and fumbles through a, “there, there.”
It’s not much comfort, but it is amusing. The mental image of the two of them on the floor, the younger doing his best to soothe the older, two broken pieces trying their hardest to fit together is enough. His body seems to get the message regardless of how out of practice the messenger is, and it begins to settle. His brain back in his skull. The air back in his lungs.
“I’m sorry about what Barty said,” Regulus says, pulling back. He cringes at his own words. “I mean, I did warn him, but he doesn’t listen.”
Sirius shrugs, his hands dropping into his lap. His throat feels raw. “It’s just hair.”
“Is it?” Regulus asks carefully.
He really, really doesn’t know anymore. And after that, well. It’s like the floodgates have opened. People keep an even wider berth, no one makes a joke or a jab. He’s snappy one moment and then watery and apologetic the next—Merlin knows how his friends put up with him. He’s building up, he thinks, to some sort of unspoken breaking point.
And then there is the window—a beautiful, colored glass pane that sits at eye level in the stairwell of the Astronomy tower. Sirius passes it every time he climbs the steps, eyes it warily like the figure formed by the glass might come to life and speak to him.
(There had been a stained glass window at Grimmauld Place for a brief time. He can just barely remember it, a purely decorative thing in the room with the family tapestry. It had depicted something like an angel, reaching downward, bathing the room in cool blues and faded greens when the light hit. He had broken it, as a child, by pure accident. A wayward bit of magic when he was too young to truly control it. The punishment had been excruciating. They bricked off the opening so that no new light could come in.)
He thinks about it as he stares up at this new window, something in him shaken loose, trembling. His parents aren’t here. So maybe it really, truly doesn’t matter anymore.
Sirius takes to the window with swinging fists and gritted teeth, glass shards raining down around him and to the ground outside, and he’s shouting, shrieking: “ How could you do those things? How could you do those things to me? ”
Soon, there is nothing left to swing at. When the haze fades, he finds himself on his knees and he weeps over the broken pieces, over his bloody hands, over all of it.
James and Peter and Remus find him like that, a shattered thing amongst the shattered pieces, and they wrap strong arms around him to keep him from collapsing in the middle of it all. He’s wailing into Remus’ chest like a wounded animal. Like he’s dying. James is running a hand in circles on his back. Peter is whispering comforting things. It’s horrid. It’s all so horrid.
They leave the room quickly before they’re caught. Privately, Sirius doesn’t think that they would get detention, not with how he’s been treated recently. Like glass. It doesn’t make him feel any better. None of it does.
They take him straight to Madame Pomfrey, and for once, she does not ask a single question as she patches him up behind the starchy white curtains. She is careful with him, but her bandages are tight and effective on his knuckles and palms and wrists. She looks him over with unreadable eyes and her lips pressed into a thin line and says, “Your friends are waiting for you.”
“What do I do?” Sirius whispers, cradling his arm to his chest.
Poppy smiles at him, achingly kind. She stands, and places a light hand atop his shorn head. “You heal, Sirius.”
Baby steps , Monty had said. This feels a bit like his first.
Because the universe despises him and wishes he was never conceived, Sirius has a plant check-in with Professor Sprout the very next morning. The first thing she says to him, when he arrives with his little sprouted plant? She tells him to name the thing.
“… What,” Sirius says, his hands stilling on the rim of the pot. Because—surely not. Surely not?
Pomona beams at him. “Now, Sirius. This is a very important step of your assignment.”
“That cannot be true,” he drawls. “It’s a plant. It’s hardly even a thing, Professor Sprout. I don’t think it cares what we call it.”
Professor Sprout says, with a gravity he almost leans away from, “If you treat something like a thing or a monster, it’s more likely to grow into something wicked. But if you treat it with love and affection and care?”
“I’m naming it Plantkenstein.”
Pomona sighs defeatedly. “Oh, alright.”
They continue their plant check-up with little to no bumps, measuring and recording the size and texture and look of the leaves and the dampness of the soil. Sirius finds the small, easy tasks almost soothing, the feel of the
“The sprout itself isn’t all that strong yet,” Pomona goes on, poking gently at it with the tip of her wand, “it just needs a little extra support.”
He groans. “A weak little sprout. Now that’s a metaphor.”
“There is a very big difference,” Professor Sprout says, “between being weak and needing help.”
Sirius says, bitterly, because he can’t stop himself from saying it, “My parents taught me otherwise.”
“And isn’t that all the proof you need?”
Pomona must see something in his face, because she turns her caring gaze from him and back to the plant she’s tending, a dark green leafy thing with low creeping mud-brown branches and tendrils. “Look at this little one. Uprooted very young, when it was but a sapling! You know, Sirius, palus orcus are native to cold and damp environments. Miserable conditions!”
He can’t actually predict where this spiel is going, so he stays quiet. His plant—or, Plantkenstein , he should probably get used to saying—sits happily on the work table, soaking in the sunshine.
Professor Sprout goes on, “Well, many a year ago, a man plucked several of these young ones up from the mud and planted them again in his garden at home. He didn’t expect much from them, mind you, he mostly just wanted to see what might happen.”
Sirius hesitates. Then, soft, “What happened, then?”
“They bloomed,” Pomona beams, “And so much more vibrant than before, too. Bigger, brighter, and so beautiful. Who would have guessed?”
Plant metaphors, he thinks distantly, Of course.
Andromeda’s had a baby.
He finds out through a letter delivered in the middle of breakfast, one dropped near him and the other near Regulus at the Slytherin table. He doesn’t catch his little brother’s reaction to it, Regulus with his back turned, but his own is probably more than he can handle anyway.
Sirius,
I heard about what happened ‘round Christmas and I am glad that you are somewhere safe. Know that it gets better eventually. I want to talk to you about it, if you could manage to slip by for a visit.
The three of us would love to see you.
Andy
Tucked in the letter and now laying flat on the table is a small photo—Andromeda, Ted and a little baby girl. She looks newly born, held like glass in her mother’s steady arms, waving chubby little arms about. Her hair seems almost multicolored: with hints of soft blue and baby pink. Andy’s included their address at the end of the letter, as well as a postscript to say that Sirius can bring along James or whomever he’d like, and to mention that Regulus had also been invited.
“Oh,” Remus says mildly, reading over his shoulder. He’s got his toast cut into little cubes again, each of them doused in jam. It’s heathen behavior. Sirius doesn’t know why he bothers. “That’s exciting. You going to go?”
Sirius frowns down at the paper for a moment longer, then folds it up and shoves it into the pocket of his robes. “Maybe. Would you come with me?”
“Of course,” Remus replies immediately. “Just say when.”
What did I do to deserve you? Sirius does not say. Instead, he turns his attention back to his own breakfast. “She’ll be a good mother, I think.”
“Good maternal instinct?”
“No,” Sirius murmurs, “she just knows what not to do.”
Remus exhales, and reaches under the table to thread their fingers together. He leans close, his shoulder a welcome resting spot for Sirius’ head, and says not unkindly, “Sometimes that’s all one needs.”
Something about breaking cycles comes to his mind, then, as he sits with his boyfriend. His Muggleborn, werewolf, very male boyfriend who he is sitting with. At the Gryffindor table. It’s surreal and it isn’t, at the same time. It makes all the sense in the world.
He thinks about his parents, and his cousins, and their parents, and their parents’ parents, and all of the miserable generations of the Black family that have lived and died and hurt each other and hurt themselves. He thinks about Alphard and Andromeda and… and himself.
James, watching them careful from across the table, reaches for the letter and scans over it. As he comes across the photograph, he utterly lights up. “Merlin! I forget how small kids are when they’re still new. She’s adorable, mate.”
“I love babies,” Peter adds, glancing over to the picture. “I’ve always wished I had younger siblings.”
“Right, you’re all only children,” Sirius grumbles, straightening up and stabbing at his eggs. “Take the blessing for what it is.”
James rolls his eyes good-naturedly and puffs out his chest. “Just you wait, Padfoot. I’m gonna be the dad to end all dads.”
Sirius doesn’t know what possesses him to say it, when he looks back on the conversation. He really truly doesn’t—not after years of swearing that he’d never have children, that he’d never ruin a child like his parents ruined him—and yet, “You’re on.”
“ You want kids?” Peter asks, surprised. It’s justified.
Sirius shrugs, going for casual and missing by a mile. “I mean. Yeah. Maybe.”
The look Remus sends him is incredibly soft. Sirius can picture it, honestly: a couple of houses for he and Remus and James and Peter and the girls and Regulus and whomever else. Noise and warmth and happiness. Kids running around, climbing in trees with no blackberry thorns waiting below. Telling his children he loves them every single day. Getting it right no matter how wrong his own parents got it.
“Well, I definitely do,” James chimes in brightly. “A whole Quidditch team of ‘em.”
Peter laughs. “You’d better check with Evans on that one, mate.”
“I’m a good negotiator,” James says, after what is slightly too long of a pause. Sirius squints at him, as the quick dart-away of his eyes, the hyper tapping of his fingertips on the table.
He decides not to read into it just yet. Instead, he leans forward, his best imitation of his old grin on his face. “Godfather privileges?”
“Obviously. That way, if I die a tragic death, you guys can raise them like I would,” James rhapsodizes, his tone dropping low to dramatize his words. He shakes a fist at the sky. “Oh, cruel, cruel world, snuffing out such a bright light.”
And in the brief lull that follows, Sirius tries to imagine it: James dying.
It’s—his brain physically skips over it, like a scratch on a vinyl record. Blips in and out. His train of thought screeches to a stop. Like the idea alone is a mistake. Young or old or in-between, James dying is unimaginable. Unfathomable. Since he was a tiny baby, Sirius has never lived in a world without a James Potter in it somewhere. He never, ever wants to.
Impossible , his mind says. It would be like the sun guttering and going out. Like the end of the world.
“You’re gonna be a good dad,” Sirius says instead of whatever is running through his mind. He sticks to the truth. “The best.”
James grins, genuine and bright. “You think so?”
“‘Course,” Sirius replies with an excited bob of his head. His smile turns mischievous. “And I’m gonna corrupt your kids so hard.”
Remus laughs. “Thank Merlin we never have to worry about that, then.”
It’s not for another handful of weeks that he and Remus can finally make it out to meet Andy’s baby. They have to get special permission from McGonagall and Dumbledore, but there’s not as much fuss as there might normally have been, and floo powder takes them right to the Tonks home in Southern London. He’s never been before, but he was always told he was welcome.
As soon as the cloud of smoke clears from the fireplace, they are met by three faces: two grinning widely, one sleeping soundly.
He’s always utterly loved his cousin, he thinks as he and Remus step out of the fireplace and dust themselves off a bit. Ted isn’t bad, himself, tall and gentle. The perfect temperament to all of Andromeda’s fire. How their baby will turn out, who knows?
“You came!” Andy exclaims, low enough to not wake the baby in her arms. The infant is wrapped tightly in a soft blue blanket that trails down to the floor.
Sirius winks at her. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Andromeda grins proudly. “You wanna hold her?”
Sirius, almost imperceptibly, steps backwards.
“Oh,” Remus says happily, as Nymphadora is passed into his steady arms. The baby looks up at him and waves her tiny fists and coos, and his boyfriend coos back. It makes Sirius feel a bit weak, actually, as he watches.
Ted and Andy seem content to let Remus fuss over their daughter for the time being, and Andy stands up from her chair and beckons for Sirius to follow her into their kitchen. She starts filling a kettle with water from the sink, and Sirius hops up to perch on the countertop opposite her. It’s a charming kitchen, cheery pale yellow cabinets and white tile.
“How are you?” Andromeda asks, turning to face him once she’s set the kettle over flame. “I mean really. I know it can’t be easy, love.”
Sirius lets his eyes wander from hers, over the tiles and the shiny brass knobs of the drawers. “It’s not. But it feels like—like it should be.”
“What do you mean?” Andy prods gently.
And he really—doesn’t know. He can’t put name to the guilt that gnaws at his bones like a starved dog whenever he fails to return to normal. He made it out. He’s away from them . Why doesn’t he feel light or free or euphoric? Why doesn’t he feel grateful? Why isn’t he happy ?
Andromeda must read it all over him. She softens. “Sirius. It’s more than alright if you aren’t exactly overjoyed yet. It’s an adjustment—a big old change. You know you’re safe, logically. Your emotions just need some time to catch up.”
“What if they don’t?” Sirius murmurs, low, “What if I’m stuck like this forever?”
One thing he has always loved about his cousin is her honesty. She doesn’t sugarcoat, or offer meaningless platitudes. She’s always been a plan-for-the-worst kind of person. So she doesn’t promise that he’ll grow out of it, or that he’ll wake up one day and things will be the same as tey were. She just folds him into her arms and says, “Then we’ll figure that out together. You’re not alone anymore, alright?”
“Alright,” he says, and they finish the mugs of tea in silence, in sync.
They carry the cups back into the sitting room, and Sirius reattaches himself back to Remus’ side, curling his legs up underneath him. Nymphadora is dozing in Remus’ arms, soft cheeks and tiny nose puffing with each breath. Sirius leans his head down, achingly gentle, and kisses her little forehead.
“Okay,” Andy laughs, crossing over to them, “I’m getting jealous. Give her here.”
Remus passes her back without a fight, careful with her little head and thin neck. She’s so small. So fucking small, and Andromeda holds her like she’s holding—not glass, but something precious. Something treasured.
He is, suddenly, one hundred percent sure that he has never, ever been held like that. Certainly not by his mother.
And there is that pathetic, ugly thing that he has resting on top of his chest—a confining, unwelcome pressure. A weight he cannot shed. A shame he can’t rid himself of. That despite it all, the whole bloody fucking lot of it, there is still a baby inside of him that wants his mother to love him. To see him and to know him and to love him.
It’s human nature, isn’t it? He can talk as much as he wants, can say fuck her until he’s blue in the face and still—people die, the earth circles the sun, the stars reach for each other until they tumble from the sky, and everyone intrinsically and unbelievably wants their mother to love them. To hold them close. To fight against the entire universe if it meant keeping their baby safe. He has not ever, once, in all of his sixteen years of living, felt safe like that.
Dora’s face screws up as if she can sense the bitterness and the hurt that is pouring out of him and she begins to wail. Andromeda and Ted are all over her in a heartbeat, cooing softly and kissing gently on her soft cheek and loving and loving and loving.
Sirius rises from his chair and leaves the room. The foyer. The house. He would walk right off of the surface of the earth if he could.
He knows, without looking, that Remus is right behind him.
“Go back inside,” Sirius warns, without turning around. It’s futile but he tries anyway. He feels like his skeleton is trying to come out of his skin. He’s shaking with it, with how big and small he feels all at once. He doesn’t want Remus caught in the blast.
And yet, stubborn to a fault, Remus says, “Like hell.”
Sirius starts walking faster, and Remus speeds up right with him until they’re walking side-by-side, aimlessly down the dirt path and through the grass and towards the very edge of the property where the woods begin. Remus reaches out and takes Sirius’ hand into his own. They don’t speak until they’re a handful of meters into the forest.
“How—” he begins, but his throat cuts him off. There’s something tired and hysterical rising in his chest, a tidal wave he can’t begin to stop. “I—”
Remus just watches him, hands fidgeting at his sides like he wants to reach out but isn’t sure he’s allowed. Sirius wants to tell him he’s always allowed. He doesn’t want to lie.
“She’s so small,” is what he settles on, something like defeat creeping into him. “She’s so tiny. She can’t—she can’t do anything on her own. She needs people to do things for her.”
Remus purses his lips, wrinkling a pale scar. “She’s got a whole houseful of people who love her,” he says softly, “no one is going to hurt her.”
“I know,” Sirius says, and he kicks at the dirt, struggles with his next sentence when it appears fully-formed on the tip of his tongue. It sounds so awful. It’s such an awful thing to think, such a bitter, foolish thought, and yet—
Perceptive, patient, perfect Remus finishes for him, less of a guess-like question and more of a statement. “It’s not fair, no. You should have had that. We all should have. And that’s why we have to keep going, Sirius.”
“Why?” He echoes, a little petulant, though he relaxes as Remus wraps strong arms around him and tucks his chin over his shoulder.
Remus says, steady like the earth, “So that whoever comes after us has it, too.”
They stay there for what feels like a brief forever, surrounded by greenery and life and death and birth, wrapped up around each other like twining tree trunks or thistles and vines. The future is at their fingertips.
It can wait a little longer.
Sirius is just coming back from a check-in, Plantkenstein in hand, when he pauses just outside of the shut door of their dorm. It’s never shut. He’s immediately suspicious, leaning close to the wood.
“Shit, fuck !” Remus’ voice hisses from behind the door. He sounds genuinely apologetic when he says, “I’m sorry, Pete.”
Peter squeaks, “It’s okay.”
And, well. His curiosity wins out by a long shot, and Sirius pushes the door open and bursts into the room like there’s a fire on his heels. And—and, oh. Oh, Merlin. His hands fly up to cover his mouth.
James sits at the end of his bed, observing intently as Remus circles around a stool that Peter is sat on. His boyfriend has a pair of scissors in his hand, towels draped over Peter’s shoulders. The ground is covered in fallen clumps of hair: curly black, wavy brown, straight sandy blonde. All three of them have cut their hair off, cropped close and clumsy, either the length of Sirius’ or even shorter.
“Er… surprise?” James attempts, grinning at him with a pair of little jazz hands framing his head. Remus and Peter’s heads snap up and towards the door, where Sirius stands, eyes wide.
Remus sighs, a little fond and a little exasperated, settling the shears down onto the bedspread. “Didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”
“What—” Sirius gets out, prying his jaw up off of the floor. “What did you do ?”
(It should be criminal how good Remus looks anyway, short hair and all. Illegal. Lock him up in Azkaban.)
He’s going to actually die. He isn’t breathing, he’s—what did they do? What have they done? And why?
James grins at him. “It’s just hair, mate. It’ll grow back. Besides, I never liked the smell of Sleakeazy’s.”
It’s just hair , Sirius thinks dazedly. Only, it isn’t at all, remotely. It’s love. He can see it now. How he got so lucky, so loved, he hasn’t the slightest clue. He wouldn’t trade it for the entire world. Peter rises from the stool, running a hand over his shorn hair, a nervous smile on his face. “We know it’s been hard for you, lately. Especially with the hair thing.”
“We’re a team,” James adds, loyal as ever. “We grow with each other.”
Remus rounds the stool and the hair on the floor and he rests his large hands on Sirius’ waist, focuses those eyes on his. “How do I look?”
Sirius chokes out, “Fucking gorgeous.”
“Right back at you,” Remus replies cheekily, tossing his head back in laughter. Sirius is shaking in his arms, his breaths coming short and fast. Remus presses his lips to Sirius’ forehead, speaks against his skin as if trying to send the words directly to his brain, his voice low. “Oh, my love. It’s all just growing pains. We’ll get through it together.”
He pulls back and turns them both gently to face the floor length mirror in their dorm. James and Peter join them, and they all stand there, side-by-side. What a sickening lot they all make—and their smiles are bright enough to light the entire solar system.
“Alright,” Sirius says, clearing his throat harshly and clapping his hands together. “Enough of the sappy shit. We have work to do.”
They put him and Peter on watch while James and Remus fiddle around with the suits of armor that line the corridor between classes. They’ve got the Cloak on, barely large enough to cover the two of them, and a few stray students give pause as the armor seems to twitch every now and then on its own. They’re charming them all to dance, and to make a dance partner out of whomever they touch.
“You seem,” Peter pipes up, after a silence, “better, now?”
Sirius grins, and for the first time in a long time, it doesn’t feel like an imitation. “Well, thanks, Wormtail. I try.”
His friend sighs good-naturedly. “No, but really, like. It’s been good to see you’re all light now. And you’re… gardening recreationally?”
Sirius snorts. “Yeah. But I’ve been thinking that maybe we don’t have to do the things that everyone expects of us. We can do something—I don’t know, something totally unexpected. Take some of that power back.”
Peter just looks at him.
“I’ve just been thinking about it,” Sirius repeats. “About breaking the cycle. You ever feel like… like everyone already assumes what you’re going to do or become?”
And here, Peter pauses, his eyes unreadable and low. “Yeah. S’pose I have.”
“Exactly,” Sirius replies, distracted by Remus and James toppling over one of the suits. He rolls his eyes but pushes off the wall to join them. “So let’s do the opposite.”
Peter must reply, but Sirius doesn’t catch it. He and Remus and James are all already laughing, and the corridor is bathed in sunlight.
His hair starts growing again. Or maybe it always has been, like he has been, from the start. But he notices it for the first time around the start of the summer. It’s long enough that Remus can run his fingers through it, that it’s begun to curl around his ears like Regulus’ does.
His room at the Potter’s is finished, or so Effie and Monty tell him when they write.
Severus Snape corners him in the Potions room on the night of a full moon just before the school year ends, all snide glares and utter contempt. Sirius’ friends have all gone, the room slowly emptying out save for he and Snape. Which, lovely.
“I know what you’re all hiding,” Severus announces, triumphant. His wand is clutched so tightly in his hand that his knuckles are going white. “I know about Lupin. About all of you.”
Sirius freezes. His heart picks up speed, his hand dipping into his pocket to feel for his wand. “What the hell are you on about?”
“I am not an idiot ,” Severus hisses, taking a step closer.
“What, contrary to popular belief?” Sirius says nastily, mirroring Snape’s step forward. They’re about a meter apart now, and Sirius’ brain is flipping rapidly between damage control and, well… doing more damage.
If Snape knows, who else might? Who else might he have told, or—or who might have just seen ? Maybe he or James or Peter had been careless with the Cloak, maybe they’d made one too many jokes, maybe the nicknames were a stupid idea, maybe, maybe, maybe . How much danger is Remus in? How can Sirius eliminate the threat?
“You know, Snivellus,” He snaps, and his grin is cruel and cold. It’s almost crazed. He knows the words that are on the tip of his tongue—words that could devastate the foundation of the world. Words to ruin everything. He can practically hear himself saying it: go to the forest and find the knot at the base of the Willow… “You really want to know what you ought to do tonight?”
Snape narrows his eyes, victory hardly concealed by contempt. “Do tell.”
He opens his mouth, poison pressing behind his teeth, and—stops.
He can’t say how he knows—will never be able to say how he knows—but he does. This is a crossroads. The earth slows its spinning. Here is where he needs to choose. He wonders if executioners ever hesitated before swinging. If stars ever paused before falling. If Sisyphus considered the possibility of his boulder before cheating death.
“You ought to,” Sirius says, and he makes his choice for better or for worse, “mind your own.”
There is a noise that only he can hear; a great groaning and creaking. The earth is shifting. Readjusting under the weight of what he has done. What he hasn’t done.
Severus rears back like he’s been slapped—like he’s surprised, like the story was supposed to go differently. He hisses, “ What ?”
“Piss off,” Sirius shrugs, as if he hasn’t just experienced the whole universe tilting on its axis. “What my friends and I do in our spare time has nothing to do with you and your inane little conspiracy.”
Snape openly gapes at him for a moment, and Sirius considers him. It’s sad, he decides, all of his contempt giving way to pity. He’d rather be dead than be so empty. Hungry for power but still starving. Never chosen—a Midas touch of darkness to those who do. Sirius had long thought himself the same. But he does not kill everything he touches, and he has proof in his hands.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Sirius says, breaking the silence with a wink and stepping around Severus’ stock-still body. “I’ve got a plant to tend to.”
He hesitates at the door to Sprout’s office, his hand pausing the air as he reaches for the knob. His heart is racing , and he can’t put a finger on why. Pomona opens the door with a surprised smile. “Sirius! I didn’t know you were coming by today. And you’ve brought young Plantkenstein.”
“Yes,” Sirius replies hurriedly, following her back inside her office. It’s as teeming with life and color as always, and he finds it endlessly comforting. Something in him his rising, unsettled. He doesn’t know what he’s just done or why it feels so much like he has broken something. Or maybe it feels like he’s fixed something—he doesn’t know.
Professor Sprout watches as he scoops the old soil out of Plantkenstein’s pot and replaces it with the new, prunes away deaf leaves and drips serum carefully into the roots. After a minute or so, she begins busying herself with a dark-stemmed light pink-leaved little sapling. “What’s on your mind?”
“I think,” Sirius says haltingly, his eyes fixed on a stray leaf on the table, “that I almost did something really foolish tonight.”
Pomona doesn’t pry, and her voice is kind without question. “A lucky thing you decided to come here, instead, then.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said. About cycles. And I… I don’t want to be like that , anymore,” he fumbles.
Sprout softens, but she doesn’t lean into it. Her voice is light and caring. “Very good, Sirius. And I don’t think you will be. As a matter of fact, I’m quite certain.”
They sneak out to Hogsmeade right before the year ends—the whole lot of them, just for the sake of getting utterly plastered. Someone is selling charmed fireworks in a stall set up between The Three Broomsticks and the station.
They buy a shit ton, obviously . Just in case.
It isn’t until the night has wound down and they’re all smuggling each other back into Hogwarts through various secret passages and portrait tunnels that Sirius leans close to Remus’ ear and says, I’ll be right back .
Remus blinks at him, somehow alert for a split second. He tilts his head, his words having apparently left him, as if to say, Need me?
Sirius shakes his head, pats clumsy hands on either side of Remus’ face and plants a sloppy kiss to his lips. Only, he misses by a few inches and it lands somewhere around the corner of his mouth and his chin.
His friends crawl in through the portraits, and he makes his way to the Astronomy Tower.
He perches by one of the big open windows, slips a cigarette from his pocket to light and waits. It isn’t until footsteps make their way up the steps that he realizes what he has been waiting for.
“Thought I might find you up here,” a voice comes, drifting in from behind him. Regulus is coming up the stairs, the green on his robes nearly black in the dark. Really, Sirius didn’t need to turn around to see who it was. He knows his brother by the sound of his breaths, by the falling of his feet. “I heard you all sneaking back in and James said you were gone. You alright?”
Things have been strange with Regulus lately. Distant. It’s felt like trying to hold onto the hourglass—slipping through his fingers faster than he can stop it. “Yeah.”
Regulus nods, and settles down on the floor a meter away, leaning his back up against the opposite side of the window frame. Sirius studies him as his brother studies the stars. When Regulus was little, his whole face had been much softer. Gentler. Time has sharpened him—sharpened both of them. Sirius thinks about cycles. He thinks about watching Regulus and James’ names move around sometimes on the Map. He thinks about water and sand and blood.
“You know how our parents are, like,” Sirius waves a hand around aimlessly, ash tumbling down from the cigarette between his fingers and to the ground below, “ bad ?”
Regulus snorts. “Alcohol makes you a poet.”
“Fuck off, I’m trying to say something.” Sirius squints out into the middle distance, his nose wrinkling up as he tries to get his thoughts to become sentences. He thinks of plants. Of hair. Of all of it, everything all at once. “Like, they were bad people in school and they… they still are.”
“This is news to you?”
He shakes his head, searching for a better way to phrase it. Somewhere in his brain, he thinks this is an important moment for them. A window of opportunity. A chance to change the inevitable. He has to try, at the very least. Doesn’t he? “I’ve been thinking that maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. For either of us.”
Regulus looks much, much older than seven and fifteen when he speaks next, after a careful pause. “I think that you are much better suited for reckless heroics. But who knows? Maybe I’ll surprise us all.”
“You can do anything,” Sirius insists. “Just need to take care of your plants.”
His baby brother keeps on looking at the sky, at the stars that share their names. Sirius wants to—to shake him, grab him and physically shake him and say, Don’t you understand? I have to protect you. That’s my job, the most important one I’ll ever have. We grew up together. Don’t let us grow apart.
“I think,” Regulus says, and he gets to his feet and offers Sirius a hand. “That it’s a nice thought. I’m glad you’re doing better.”
Sirius frowns at him, stumbling upright. He’s clumsy but he has to be careful. In the back of his hazy mind, he knows he has to be so careful. Like he’s handling an explosive. Like he’s handling his own heart, the one that beats outside of his body. “Y’should leave, too. Come with me.”
“Not that you didn’t make it look appealing, what with the myriad of very public breakdowns,” Regulus says, and they both laugh. It’s the same laugh, at a slightly different pitch. Somewhere in the blur of alcohol, Sirius finds the fact a little poetic, and a lot sad. “I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll tell me, though? If you—if you ever need anything or if you… just want to talk, you’ll tell me?”
Regulus softens, but he is still so sad. It’s all over him, like fingerprints, like a tattoo that says, love me love me love me. “Yeah, Sirius. I’ll tell you.”
They leave the tower together, side by side, breathing in rhythm. It is one of the last times they will walk in step with each other, one of the last times they will breathe in tandem, but neither of them know that. Perhaps it is better that they don’t.
They are still growing, both of them. Maybe they will grow towards each other again; two blackberry vines twisted around themselves, reaching into the earth and the sky alike, to the water and to the smoke. Can a cycle be broken? Can destiny be thwarted? Maybe the future will be calm—a flat ocean under a cloudless sky. Or maybe it will bring betrayal, darkness and light, snakes and skulls and sorrow, rising tides and sweeping curtains.
How does the story go? The story goes: Cain kills Abel. The story goes: Jacob betrays Esau. The story goes: Seth kills Osiris. The story goes: Thyestes betrays Atreus. The story goes: Romulus kills Remus. The story goes: Sirius and Regulus are leaving the tower side by side. How does the story go?
The story is not finished yet. The story says they are still growing. That they are always growing.
The potted plant in their dorm room is now sprouting fruit. Sirius notices it one morning, running late to Divination.
He doesn’t have time to inspect it too closely, only squints at it from across the room, taking note of the little green and red and yellow buds at the ends of the tiny vines. He really needs to figure out what kind of plant he’s dealing with, but he files the thought away and shuts the door behind him.
They have a prank planned for today—some crazy idea that Remus dreamed up in that wicked mind of his, some sort of charm to move the gargoyles around the castle. Not without the risk of sounding like an utter sap, but it feels good . Like coming home. Everyone’s stopped walking on eggshells and hesitating on normalcy. Even the detention that ensues isn’t enough to bring him down—isn’t that something?
By the time the ruckus has blown over and all of the statues are back in their rightful places (if a few in new poses), he makes his way to Professor Sprout’s with Plantkenstein in tow.
“Sirius,” Pomona greets him with a smile, her hands buried in a planter full of fresh soil. She’s moving little valerian sprigs for some of the second-years to tend to in the coming weeks. Since his first visit with Plantkenstein, he’s come to be much more at home in the greenrooms. Something about being close to death makes one want to surround themselves with life, he’s found.
He waves with his free hand as he maneuvers himself and Plantkenstein around the long troughs and rows of greenery. He can hear muffled fussing to his left as he passes by a cluster of baby Mandrakes. “I’ve got a plant-related dilemma, Pomona, and you’re my only hope.”
“My favorite sort of dilemma!” Professor Sprout exclaims, cheeks round and pink. She pries her arms up out of the planter and cleans them off with a damp rag set nearby. “I see you’ve brought young Plantkenstein by. Let’s have a look at him.”
Sirius nods and sets the pot down on the workbench beside them, turning the plant left and right to display the little buds. “I know you live for suspense, but I’d really like to know what Plantkenstein is before he starts dropping fruit left and right.”
“ Ah ,” Pomona says with meaning, a twinkle in her eye. She produces her wand from one of the pockets in her apron and gestures for Sirius to get his. “Well, there is a way to accelerate the growth of this particular species. Flore sicut ego florui .”
Plantkenstein, ever the cooperative little lad, starts to tremor in his pot. Sirius has half a mind to reach out and steady it—which, okay, transformation into plant person complete—when the little branches start to snap and grow. The leaves get bigger and almost fuzzy-looking, crawling along the thorny arms and onto the wooden table below. And the tiny red and yellow buds swell and darken, plump and ripe in seconds. Sirius squints at it.
Oh, you’re kidding.
“Now, let’s see…” Pomona muses, circling once around the now-grown plant. She brightens. “Ah! It seems we have ourselves a very healthy little blackberry bush!”
Sirius bursts, without thinking, loud and unapologetic as a dish breaking or a star crashing to earth: “ Fuck me.”
Pomona turns to him and an apology is already on his lips when she says, voice pitched with mischief and eyes shining, “Though your hair is looking lovely, now, I think I’ll have to pass that offer up.”
The two of them break into laughter so loud and so lively that it wakes the Mandrakes. Sirius notes, in the back of his mind as he’s bent over and clutching his middle, that all of the tears in his eyes are of joy.
Isn’t that something?
Summer ends with his hair just touching his shoulders, and with Effie and Monty seeing he and James off at the train platform. Summer ends with James’ hair back to being wild and sticking up in every direction, with Remus’ kept short at the sides but curling long and loose atop his head, with Peter’s flopping over his forehead. They all look just as they used to, and yet entirely new. Summer ends and melts gracefully into fall and Sirius’ hair is still growing and so is he. Fall arrives, and the cycle starts anew. There is talk of a war on the horizon, but for now, they are still children. Everything is just as it was—and everything has changed. He catches his reflection in the foggy glass window of the train as he passes by.
He grins.
He grows.
“i don’t know who we’ll become—
i can’t promise it’s not written in the stars,
but i believe that when it’s done,
you’re gonna see that it was better
that we grew up together.”
(grow as we go, ben platt)