Chapter Text
August 1976
Sirius sat, stiff-backed and blank-faced, and tried to remember a time he hadn’t hated this house. When having to exist here, with them, didn’t feel like a slow and painful death. Although it was true that, before Hogwarts, he hadn’t resented every waking minute of his existence here as he did now, it hadn’t exactly been sunshine and roses. But back then, he had nothing to compare it to.
On the other side of the table, Regulus picked at his food and didn’t dare meet his gaze. The brothers had hardly exchanged two words the whole summer—a feat made easier by Sirius’ insistence on spending nearly all of the holidays so far in his room. He wouldn’t even be in the house at all, but his mother had expressly forbidden his visiting James as planned, throwing in some painful new wandwork to make sure he understood that she meant it. He dragged himself down to dinner each night, knowing it was either that or starvation, and for the first month or so it had been easier to tune out the endless jibes, the vile bigotry that counted as mealtime conversation to his parents.
He had reached his limits, though, resistance worn down by too much time away from his friends. James had told him to keep his head down, ignore the fuckers and wait for September to roll around. Sound advice, except that keeping his head down was not a sustainable task for Sirius. Last week, he’d called his mother an inbred cesspit of a human being, after one of her rants about impure blood. His father had rewarded this outburst with judicious, merciless use of the ornate gold poker that sat by the fireplace. The bruises on his arms and torso weren’t likely to fade for a while.
But even with his father’s penchant for beatings using a truly innovative variety of objects, once he had started, Sirius couldn’t stop. He could not sit there and just listen passively as they spouted yet more brainless shite, toxic bile that denigrated some of the very best people in Sirius’ life. Surely his silence was as good as his tacit agreement—surely that would make him just as bad as them. And then how was he supposed to look himself in the mirror, to look his friends in the eye? He couldn’t—wouldn’t—do it. So he collected a few bruises, learnt some new curses. A small price to pay, he thought.
“Maybe Durmstrang is the answer after all,” his mother was saying, swirling red wine idly round the glass resting in her palm. Sirius glanced over at her sharply, and she smirked. “Far fewer Mudbloods and half-breeds there. Could be the palate cleanse the boy needs.”
“Could be prudent,” his father agreed mildly.
"What?" He looked between the two of them; they just stared back at him, passive and devoid of anything resembling normal human emotion. "You can't take me out of Hogwarts—"
"Perhaps Durmstrang will get rid of his compulsion to speak when he's not being spoken to," Orion Black noted, voice cold and bored.
Enough. This was more than enough. Whatever little restraint he'd had left snapped like a twig; fuck manners, fuck keeping his head down. Fuck these people. “I’m not going to that shit-hole,” Sirius snapped, his fork clattering to the table. “You can’t do that.”
“Can’t we?” Walburga raised a sharp brow. “You are not of age yet, dear boy. I rather think we can do what we please.” She sipped her wine. “You would certainly benefit from proper discipline.”
“Discipline won’t change me to the pureblood twat you want it to,” he spat, scraping his chair back. It felt like his heart was going to thump out of his chest, adrenaline ratcheting through his veins. “I’m not going anywhere except back to Hogwarts.”
“With those wretched traitors and scum you call friends—?”
“Oh, why don't you go fuck yourself, mother?”
Regulus, who’d been studiously—and with no small amount of cowardice—staring at his plate so far, snapped his gaze up at this. The brothers shared a look: there’s the catalyst, then.
If Sirius thought that the past few weeks had been bad, he was about to get a lesson in escalation. Because that was when things really went to shit.
“It was a great castle, once.”
Remus glanced up at the ruins, squinting, trying to see what had once been there. He liked castles, liked ruins and history and places with stories, he really did—but this wasn’t new to him. They walked up to the castle ruins every summer—sometimes many times—and had this same conversation. His uncle Meirion had found many years ago that Remus was the only one left of the “young’uns” who would listen to him talk about Llantrisant Castle. Given they had grown up just down the road from it, he couldn’t blame the others for having lost interest. So, while his cousins sunbathed, or rather, lay sprawled on the grass, flicking dried clumps of turf at each other, he did his nephew-ly duty and engaged in conversation. “It’s quite something,” he agreed politely.
“Bloody good spot for defence,” his uncle added, as he always did. “You can practically see all the way to England from up here.”
“Yes,” Remus nodded, looking around him idly. He didn’t say, you’d have to have exceptional eyesight, just felt guilty for letting the snide thought cross his mind. It was too hot for this. “Impressive.”
“We should get down to Cardiff tomorrow,” Meirion pondered, still staring up at the crumbled pillar of ancient rock. “Now that’s a cracking castle.”
“Mm,” Remus agreed.
“Motte and bailey castle,” his uncle shook his head happily. “Marvellous, it is.”
Remus nodded. He was sweating profusely now, even though they’d only left the cottage about fifteen minutes ago. His Muggle cousins never did understand why he wore long sleeves even in the height of summer; these trips were always an exercise in trying to maintain a reasonable body temperature. Still, he liked seeing them, and he knew his mum loved spending time with her sister. If he had to suffer shirt sleeves for a few weeks, well, so be it.
“Da,” a bored voice interrupted what was sure to be further details on Cardiff Castle. “Can we get an ice cream? It’s bloody boiling.”
“Watch that mouth, Bethan,” Meirion frowned, but turned away from the ruins nonetheless. “Or you’ll get nothing but a clip round the ear from your mother.” He looked over at Remus. “Ice cream, lad?”
Remus nodded, falling into step with his uncle as they made their way back down the slope. Bethan and her sister joined them, merrily chatting away about some exploits planned for next week with friends. “Have you seen much of your friends this hols, Rem?” Bethan asked. “Do they live round your way?”
“No, not really…they’re in London, Sheffield, Malmsmead—"
“Where?”
“Don’t interrupt, Ang,” Bethan scolded her sister. “And it’s in Cornwall.”
“Devon,” Remus corrected her. “Exmoor.”
“Well,” Bethan shrugged with a grin, “same thing.”
“They haven’t come up to Hereford then?” Angharad asked. “That sounds dead boring.”
He was used to it by now. He knew that Sirius and James often saw each other in the holidays, and Pete spent most of it working for his father to earn extra pocket money. Last summer, they’d all been invited to James’ for a week, but it fell across the full, and his parents wouldn’t let him go. Besides, he had spent years being used to solitude, and, unlike his friends, he was perfectly capable of losing himself in a book for days on end. So, it was dull by most people’s standards—but it was bearable.
The solitude and distance had also given him some time to sift through his own thoughts. Fifth year had not been without its ups and downs: he felt fairly confident that he’d scraped through the O.W.Ls, at least. But something had shifted amongst their group—Sirius seemed to look at him differently, treat him differently, and he had no idea why. Remus had always prided himself on his ability to keep his crush under lock and key, so he was pretty sure that the changes weren’t because Sirius had cottoned on to his friend’s feelings. That was small comfort though, and had done nothing to quell the riot of questions and hormones that seemed to wash over him every time Sirius so much as glanced his way.
On top of that, Snape had decided that Remus was keeping a secret—which, in fairness, was not incorrect—and had been determined to find out what it was. So far, he’d been unsuccessful, but Remus worried that it was only a matter of time. The boy was clever, as much as James and Sirius would never admit to it, and seemed utterly unwilling to let this drop. A small part of Remus felt like returning to school was going to be akin to walking into a trap of his own making.
But another part of him told him that he thought too much (that part seemed to have the voice of his friends, funnily enough) and to stop worrying. He had hoped that his usual jaunt to his cousins’ in Llantrisant would help do that job.
Evidently, hope was no match for Remus Lupin’s overactive brain.
He shook his head, and gave his little cousin a half-hearted smile. “I’ll be seeing them all again in two weeks anyway. It doesn’t matter.”
The time would go quickly. Maybe he wasn’t in as much of a rush to get back as he’d thought he would be. And at least he was going to be spending a week of that time with family—overheating in long sleeves, maybe, but easy-going company.
Maybe the overheating would shut down his brain. One could dream.
The air in the garden was still. The grass had suffered in the drought, and was now a scratchy yellow rather than its usual lush green. And, although it was hotter than Hades even at six in the evening, it was still marginally cooler outside than it was in the house. That was why Lily had persevered, sitting in the shade of the weeping willow, trying to take in some of the information from her summer reading. Perhaps she shouldn’t have chosen today to try to tackle Advanced Arithmancy.
She normally loved tackling her reading list over the summer break—she soaked up the new learning like a sponge. Her friends usually had to tear her away from studying to meet up in London or Nottingham or wherever had caught their interest this time.
She knew why it was harder this summer. Why everything seemed harder.
Having someone she thought of as her best friend—the boy who had introduced her to magic, who had made her feel part of this hidden world—call her something so deeply, disgustingly awful was enough to send anyone’s mind off-kilter.
She’d been so busy just getting through her exams, and then getting to the end of term, that she hadn’t let herself really face up to what had happened until she returned home. Unsurprisingly, being back in Cokeworth brought up memories of Severus. Memories of what had happened. Memories of the look on his face as he’d spat that word at her. Memories of how her insides had turned to ice at the sound. Memories of how it had taken all of her energy, all of her sense of self-preservation, not to burst into tears right there in front of Potter and Black and half the bloody school. She didn’t want to talk about it, she didn’t want to think about it, but it all kept resurfacing over and over, like a stone that refused to sink.
A large part of it was that she felt humiliated. Humiliated, that she had ever thought this person cared about her. That she had put her faith in him, for nothing. That she had defended him, over and over, to her other friends.
And, yes, humiliated to be baited into yet another argument with Potter. Humiliated to be asked out in front of everyone they knew, a joke to him that was not remotely funny to her. Humiliated to think that dating her was just another hilarious prank in a long line of hilarious pranks designed to make others feel small.
She bristled. This wasn’t about him. She couldn’t give a toss if Potter wanted to pretend he fancied her for a cheap laugh. Surely she had more maturity than that.
No, the Potter of it all was easier to push aside. A leopard couldn’t change its spots. It was, as Marlene had delicately phrased it, the ‘M-word’ issue.
You couldn’t be a Muggleborn at Hogwarts without having had that word hurled at you at least once a year. From the likes of Avery and Rosier and Mulciber, it glanced off her now. It was old news. Oh, you think I’m impure scum that should be wiped off the face of the earth? Find me when you get some new material.
Severus calling her that, though…and so easily, too. As if he’d thrown that word out before, used it to cut someone down, to raise himself up. After telling her that her blood didn’t matter, that it wouldn’t matter, that she was just as clever and talented as anyone else.
Breaking news, she thought glumly. People are lying shits.
The one benefit, she supposed, was that she felt hardened to it all now. What had once hurt so acutely, now was simply numb. She didn’t need friends like that. She didn’t need to give him the benefit of the doubt when that word undid everything they had built between them in a mere two syllables.
She sighed and cast the book aside, reaching back to scrape her hair up into a hasty bun. Maybe an errant breeze might offer some relief. Miracles did happen.
“Lil?” A voice called through from the house. “Dinner’s almost ready, love.”
She glanced guiltily at the book now laying on the lawn. At least she still had two weeks to catch up on reading. She just needed to get her head on straight.
“Coming!” she called back.
James had known it was going to be a bad day as soon as he had woken up that morning. A bad day to add to a summer of bad days, frankly. The glorious (if unrelenting) sunshine of the past weeks had shifted into a heavy humidity, the sky an unbroken, flat grey that didn’t seem close to offering rain. The air was thick, ominous almost, and he couldn’t even top up his suntan to make up for the heat. He had already worked his way through everything Devon had to offer that could possibly hold a sixteen-year-old’s interest, and some other things besides. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d marched up Dunkery Beacon, as if maybe this time he’d see something different from the top. Yesterday he’d been bored enough to accompany his mum on a shopping trip to Barnstaple. A shopping trip, something James had long considered the worst kind of outing. And there were still two whole weeks to get through.
He whiled away the day largely through swimming, messing about on his broom, and bothering his parents; by the evening, he was slumped in the living room, a book about Quidditch just barely holding his attention, and wishing something interesting would happen.
Which was when his best friend came tumbling out of the fireplace in a flash of green flames.
“What on earth—” his dad bolted up in his armchair, his copy of the Daily Prophet dropping to the ground. “Is that—?”
“Sirius?” James leapt up, stepping forward just in time to catch the other boy as his knees crumpled beneath him. “Mate, what’s—”
The words left him when his friend managed to straighten up, blinking away ash and clearly trying very hard to focus on James’ face. Sirius was pale, and littered with bruises. He was holding his arm close to his torso in an odd way, as if scared to move it much. His lip was swollen and bleeding.
James hadn’t meant something at this level of interesting.
It took more than an hour for Euphemia to patch him up, and Sirius sat the whole time in silence, staring dully ahead as if he couldn’t see them at all. It was more than a day before he spoke, in fact, simply saying that he wasn’t ever going back home again, and he wouldn’t bother them for long, just needed somewhere as a stop gap. All three Potters had (gently) shouted that idea down at once.
“You don’t need to convince me, sweet,” Euphemia told James at breakfast a few days later. “Even if that awful woman comes here in person, he’s not setting foot back in that house. I won’t allow it.”
He knew that he should’ve felt relieved—he did, sort of—but something was still tugging at his insides, as if a part of him deep down knew that nothing was ever going to be as simple as all that. That even if Sirius now lived with them, even if his parents treated him like a second son, even if he was swaddled in love and kindness and safety, his friend would still not be okay.
James watched him over the next two weeks, feeling as if this boy was someone different, someone he had never quite met before. Sirius had always been prone to moods, to darkness and anger; but usually it sat alongside his bright smile, his warm and generous laugh, his tactile nature that wanted to hug and be hugged and get in people’s personal space, whether they liked it or not.
This Sirius did not seem to want to be particularly close to anyone; he couldn’t seem to smile, or laugh, or joke around with James as he usually did. James hoped, fervently hoped, that returning to Hogwarts might bring his friend some desperately-needed lightness. That it might mean the return of the boy he knew and loved like a brother.
If anything, it made it worse.