Late at night (or is it early in the morning?), Sirius Black sits by a dying fire in the Gryffindor common room and twiddles a quill between his fingers. Nominally, he is studying for the charms exam they have tomorrow, but he’s not actually accomplishing anything-- hasn’t been for some time. He supposes he should got to bed, but the chair is comfortable annd the fire is warm, and it would take more energy than he has to extricate himself from his piles of notes to go upstairs.
It’s moments like this when he’s homesick.
For all that he departed dramatically last summer, swearing never to return, Sirius Black misses his family. He misses the camaraderie between cousins. He misses the pride in his father’s smile. He remembers being defended by Bellatrix and defending little Reggie in turn, and he misses that, too.
And then he feels guilty for it, just like he feels guilty for the first few months of first year when mudblood tripped off his tongue with ease, and the shame and guilt and bitternerness settle heavy in his gut, a roiling, twisting mass that makes him want to puke. Or perhaps that’s the firewhiskey.
The quill goes spinning off his fingers to land atop The Evolution of Wand Techniques in the 19th Century, resting complacently beside a crumpled piece of parchment and a suspicious Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean. It’s a stupid trick, the spinning, that he learnt at James’s over the summer, but it works better on muggle pens. On quills, it doesn’t work at all, really, because nothing in his life ever does, it’s all just trash and he’s probably going to fail this stupid test that he can’t even be bothered to study for. Suddenly, irrationally, he’s angry, because he’s a Black by birth, and that carries a legacy he’ll never escape. From his perfect penmanship to his fluent Latin (Latin, for Merlin’s sake, it’s bloody useless), he was raised a Black to die a Black, and he is terribly, horribly afraid that without that, he is nothing.
He wishes one of his mates would come downstairs so he wouldn’t feel so alone. Then he doesn’t, because here he is fretting about dead languages and cursive, which is stupid, the fretting not the cursive, he means. Absently, he notes that the fire is well and truly out now, and he is cold. Glancing down at the text in his lap, he tries to focus, but the words slip through his grasp, gone so quick, just like Bellatrix’s sanity and Andromeda’s smile and Narcissa’s kindness. His head falls forward to meet his fist, and he groans, because he is definitely going to fail.
Footsteps on the stairs, but he’s to numb to care. Raising his head, he sees not James or Remus or Peter, but Lily Evans, the girl who stole his best mate. He’s instantly defensive. He’d rather not have company, least of all the girly kind that pries and prods and can’t leave well enough alone. He waits for her to say something, but to his surprise, she does not, just takes the seat across from him and mirrors his attitude, staring at the fire.
They sit like that for a while.
Almost without any conscious decision, he finds himself talking, all the muddled-up messes of his life flooding out in one great rush. He doubts it makes any sense, yet she just sits there and listens and doesn’t interrupt, and for that, he is grateful. When he is finished, she offers no other comment but, “I’m sorry,” and he wonders when she learned to understand grief. For the first time, he thinks maybe he understands what James sees in this girl.
It turns out that Evans knows quite a bit about Charms. Her explanations makes much more sense to him that Flitwick’s, which are, to his view, overly theoretical. Before he expects it, the sun is rising in a flurry of reds and oranges, sending rays of sunlight through the curtains. Lily stumbles upstairs to shower; he, downstairs, in search of breakfast. He is halfway thorugh his toast when he realizes that he never thanked her, but it is alright, because somehow he’s sure she knows. His mates join him at breakfast. Peter has blue hair-- he wonders how that happened-- and James’ tie is crooked, just like his smile, and it’s perfectly imperfect. In between bites, he thinks that this is as good a family as he’ll ever need.
