Chapter Text
Sirius is going to die.
He grips the armrests of his seat, presses the soles of his shoes into the theatre floor, and breathes in.
Then out.
Then in.
I am going to die, he thinks again. Irrational? No. Not in the sodding slightest. There’s no other conclusion. He’s in a packed Muggle theatre with hundreds of people around him in every direction. Rows and rows of glowing faces. A massive tiered ring around the stage, and the stage—Merlin’s tits, the theater is this circular, suspended thing that must’ve been done with some magic, it can’t all be Muggle, because it’s inside the old Exchange building and hovering above the floor. All the people inside fuck about with programmes and packages of Muggle sweets like they’re not floating. They breathe and rustle and move and Merlin’s arsehole, he is going to die.
The bloke next to him nudges Sirius’s elbow with his own. Sirius glares at him.
Oh, sod it all to Merlin’s crack—he’s on a date with this bloke. Sirius invited him here because James insisted. You don’t have to do it on your own, Paddy, he said when he pressed the tickets into Sirius’s hand. I’d rather you didn’t.
You come, then, Sirius argued, smiling hugely to hide how much he didn’t want it.
Didn’t want the tickets. Didn’t want a date. Didn’t want to disappoint his only godson, who is a bloody child Shakespearean actor for reasons Sirius has never been able to work out. He gets being attracted to the words. Of course he bloody does. He’s not stupid. He’s not a writer, like Regulus, but a man doesn’t have to be a writer to have heard of Shakespeare, for fuck’s sake.
Even Muggles love Shakespeare. They still haven’t sussed out that the man was a wizard.
Sirius smooths out his face and raises his eyebrows instead.
“Yeah?” he whispers.
“You all right?” the bloke whispers back.
“Yeah, fine. Got—” Sirius waves at the stage. “Got caught up.”
Fake snow flutters to the stage floor from some Muggle machine or other hidden above, by the lights. A load of boulders decorates centre stage, which is where Lucius Malfoy—that pretty, stuck-up, son of a bitch who is Sirius’s cousin-in-law because the Malfoys have a double-arseload of money and Lucius must be, must be, impressive in bed for Cissy to put up with his Muggle Shakespeare acting like she does—swans about, making his approaching madness look handsome.
“—daughters?” the bloke next to Sirius whispers.
“What?”
“Lear’s got daughters in the original, doesn’t he?”
“Yep,” says Sirius crisply. He doesn’t know why they changed Lear’s daughters to sons for this production, and it doesn’t matter, really. Not to Sirius.
He’s here for his godson, who has just come onstage. He’s playing the younger version of one of Lear’s sons. Gregory? Gideon? Something with a G. There are two other boys with him, dressed in Shakespearean clothes. Harry’s in green. The other boys are dressed in red and blue. Three princes playing a silent clapping game.
In the scene, Lucius—Lear—is losing the rest of his mind.
“I remember thine eyes well enough,” he says, and reaches for Harry, who laughs and dances out of his reach.
Something changes in Lucius’s face. Sirius can’t put his finger on what. A grimace, he thinks, which makes sense for madness, but there’s something about it—
Lucius stumbles, reaching for one of the boulders, then stands there, stock-still.
That can’t be right. He’s barely been still this whole bloody time. Lucius has been existing in Lear’s world since the second he stepped onstage, and Lear’s world is always moving.
“Down—” Lucius frowns. He presses his fingertips into his chest like it’s got sensitive. Sirius has failed out of the Healer training course at St Mungo’s three times, but his mind falls straight into the patterns he’d learned there, ticking off the wrongs. The colour of Lucius’s face, even accounting for the stage makeup—wrong. The wobble in his stance—wrong. The half-open mouth, struggling for his line—wrong.
“He’s having a heart attack,” Sirius says.
“He’s acting,” his date answers.
“Down from the waist they are Centaurs,” says Lucius, and the wheezy break in his voice is what pulls Sirius out of his seat.
“Sirius,” the bloke—can’t remember his name—hisses. “Sirius, sit down.”
But he’s scrambling forwards into the slightly less-empty row ahead of him and leaping over the armrests.
“The wren,” Lucius heaves as Sirius finally makes it to the open aisle.
The three little boys, Sirius’s godson among them, have tightened to a clutch on the side of the stage. An usher runs to stop Sirius, but he’s there already, flying onto the hardwood, landing like a snowflake, because the world in here is a funnel, bringing him down and down and down.
Lucius falls with a heavy thump.
“Lucius.” The man playing Gloucester has pushed his bandages up so he can see, but he trips on one of the rocks and lands on his knee.
Sirius is the first person to reach Lucius, and to roll him over onto his back.
“Dost thou know me?” whispers Lucius.
“Yeah,” Sirius chokes.
He knows the spells to try. He knows the Muggle backup for wandless emergencies.
But he can’t make himself reach for his wand. He can’t make himself lay his hands on Lucius’s chest. His hands ache, the nerves lighting up with old Unforgivables. Crucio, his mother says in his memory, like she’d say Lumos.
He can’t get past it.
Sirius can’t make himself try. He can barely make himself breathe.
Lucius looks past Sirius. Through him. Confused lines appear in the too-pale skin between his eyebrows.
“Sun,” he says.
“I’m not a doctor,” Sirius calls, his voice picked up by the shape of the stage and carried out and out and out until it must die somewhere in the cheap seats. “Is anyone a doctor? He needs a doctor.”
Too late. They’re all too late.
A Muggle doctor rushes onstage carrying a Muggle defibrillator. Not two seconds after, a Healer Sirius vaguely recognises from some course at Mungo’s pushes Sirius out of the fray, wand already out.
Sirius stands. Someone’s got to hide the Healer’s wand. It’s not against the Statute to cast in front of Muggles when lives are at stake, but there are bloody loads of them.
It’s for nothing. Nobody notices. There is no curtain in this round-arse theatre, but the audience knows—they’re not supposed to see this. They’re already going for the doors. The Healer cuts Lucius’s Shakespearean clothes open with a neat Diffindo, and the Muggle doctor reaches in with his wires. If he notices the Healer casting, he doesn’t show it.
And then they’re shocking him, right there on the stage where Lucius was Lear a minute ago. Lucius twitches. Sirius puts his hands out, his heart pounding. Lucius’s heart is not pounding. The Muggle doctor shakes his head, then shocks him again.
Sirius moves without thinking. Tries to get between Lucius and the Crucio. But there’s no Unforgivable to block.
This is healing.
A snowflake drifts into Lucius’s open eye, but he doesn’t blink. It’s piling up on his face. In the Healer’s hair. On the Muggle doctor’s hands.
“Will someone please turn off the fucking snow?” a man shouts.
Sirius looks up into the stage lights.
The snow keeps falling.
“—don’t know CPR?” somebody asks.
They’re asking Sirius. He blinks into the face of a Muggle in some uniform or other. “What?”
“You don’t know CPR?”
“No.” Sirius does know CPR, since wands can break. They can get lost. Hands can go weak and floppy and drop them. Sirius has never been able to successfully perform CPR, even on a practice manikin.
“But you ran onstage anyway.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you know the victim?”
He’s got a notepad in his hands and a frown on his face. What’s Sirius supposed to say? Of course I knew him. Everybody knew him. He married my cousin. Do you think there’s anybody left on the bloody earth who didn’t hear about Cissy Black’s wedding?
But this man—this Muggle—won’t have heard of Cissy’s wedding, because it was a wizarding wedding, so it only got a mention in the Muggle papers instead of the wall-to-wall wizarding coverage, and Cissy only shows up in playbills as wife, Narcissa, as in Lucius lives in London with his wife, Narcissa, and their son. Which is bollocks. They live in Wiltshire, which is maybe what Cissy married him for. Wiltshire. The Malfoys own most of Wilshire, not just the Manor.
“I’ve heard of him,” Sirius says, and puts a hand to his hair. “I was just in the audience.”
They’re putting him on a stretcher now, still dressed as Lear. Someone’s going to have to tell Cissy. Someone’s going to have to tell her son. Sirius goes cold in the stage lights, then hot. The Muggle doctor folds a white sheet over Lucius’s face.
Sirius looks away, heart in his throat.
His godson, Harry, stands at the side of the stage, out of the lights, his lips pressed together and his eyes wide.
What the bloody fuck has Sirius been doing, standing here? Lucius isn’t why he came at all. Harry is why he came. Because Lily got a call at the last-minute—some lantern gone mad in the Vatican vaults that won’t wait an extra day for a curse-breaker—and James is at St Mungo’s, like he usually is. He already took off for the shows earlier in the week. So Sirius got a Portkey to Manchester and a date and two train tickets back to London. It’ll be a late night, but—
The Muggle in uniform asks something else.
“Don’t know,” Sirius says, and goes to Harry.
He’s got his hands tucked behind his back against the brick wall next to the stage door, and he’s oddly still for a boy who Sirius has personally witnessed tearing through his parents’ back garden at Godric’s Hollow on a toy broom until the broom snapped, tossing Harry into a flower bed, after which Harry popped up like a daisy and kept running.
Maybe it’s the clothes. He’s a little prince tonight. Breeches. Stockings. A dark green doublet over his white shirt, and some leather thing—a jerkin?—over that. A matching green cap over his dark curls, which he got directly from James, along with his brown skin and his oversized energy. His chin, his eyes—those are Lily’s. Sirius would say the lightning-bolt scar that takes up half Harry’s forehead and branches down over his right eye, leaving a white trail through the green and tapering off at his cheekbone, is Lily’s, too, since she’s the reason it’s only a scar.
Harry doesn’t look at Sirius as he bends his knees to get down to his height.
“Hey, Fawns.” Sirius swipes the cap off Harry’s head and settles it back on. “You make a good prince.”
Harry’s eyes follow something behind Sirius. The stretcher, judging by the rattling wheels. When it’s gone, those huge, green eyes come to Sirius’s, gleaming with tears.
“Do you think Lucy’s dead?” Harry asks, twisting his hands behind his back.
Sirius coughs. Lucius Malfoy is one-hundred-percent dead. Not-coming-back dead. Really dead. Should he be the one telling Harry that sort of thing? James would be better at it. He’s got more practice, anyway, what with all his Healing.
“If he is,” Sirius starts, feeling around for the truth that will hold up the lie. “He was doing what he loved most in the world when he died, so…that’s…good. Right?”
Harry blinks at him. His chin dimples, then smooths out. “Acting is what I love most in the world, too.”
Sirius thinks that’s bollocks. What Harry loves most in the world is running about like a pixie until he crashes into something. Now’s not the time for that discussion, though.
He tugs one of Harry’s arms out from behind his back and takes his hand. “You remember the plan, yeah? We’re taking the train to London.”
Harry nods, brightening a bit. Sirius estimates he’ll be passed out before they leave Piccadilly.
Sirius stands, Harry’s hand still in his. “Let’s get out of here.”