Chapter Text
“Listen up fives! A ten is speaking!”
Sirius was standing up on his bed, arms outstretched, holding court before their entire Gryffindor year group. They could have met in an abandoned classroom for this little planning session, but venturing outside of Gryffindor’s cosy walls had not proved necessary. Whoever had laid out the ward scheme for the dorms centuries ago had clearly harbored some double standards, because while the boys could not ascend the stairs to the girls’ rooms, the same could not be said in reverse.
Helena, sitting crisscrossed at the foot of Sirius’s bed, knocked his shin with her elbow and snorted. He glanced down at her, gray eyes dancing.
“Not you, Hellcat,” he said, wiggling his brows with a playful leer. “Don’t worry, you’re almost as gorgeous as me. Nine point nine for sure, luv.”
“Well maybe if you would teach me your hair styling charms…”
“Alas! Those are a Black family secret. You’ll have to marry me if you want to learn them.”
“A dire prospect,” Helena quipped back, mockingly grave.
Sirius’s face screwed up, like he couldn’t decide whether he should laugh or pout.
“Not that they even work,” James muttered from the foot of his own bed directly to the left of Sirius’s.
Remus, Dorcas, and Wormtail were sitting on Remus’s bed across from them, with Alice and Marlene situated primly on Remus’s shabby school trunk.
Lily, for all her professed aversion to James, had chosen to sit on his bed right next to him. And she turned to him then with a look of frank disbelief. “Sirius tried to teach you his hair charms?” she asked incredulously.
James, naturally, took that as his cue to run his hand through his hair, messing it up even further from its normal wild nest. “The Potter family curse,” he told her, puffing his chest out. “Not even dark magic can tame this.”
“Dark magic, he says.” Remus cast a sly grin at Sirius.
Sirius barked an easy laugh in reply, which faded quickly when Pettigrew decided to chime in.
“It’s the Black family, Moony! Everyone knows their magic is evil.”
Helena glanced back up at Sirius just in time to see his jaw clench, the muscle jumping visibly beneath his skin once before he forced his lips back into a smile. “Oh fuck off,” he said, and Helena could tell that he wanted to sound lighthearted, to sound unbothered as he’d been when James and Remus jokingly proclaimed those same sentiments which Pettigrew uttered so earnestly, but Sirius didn’t quite manage it as he tacked on, “It’s just hair charms.”
“Of course, yeah, no! You wouldn’t use any of the evil stuff. I know that!” Wormtail was quick to say, practically tripping over his words. “I only meant in general, you know? Like you’re always saying.”
“Right,” Sirius drawled, “Of course. Thanks, Peter.”
An awkward second ticked past. Helena nudged Sirius’s leg again, and when he glanced down and made eye contact with her, she silently mouthed ‘Voldemort’ at him, raising her brows sardonically.
Sirius grinned quick-sharp. “Fiendfyre,” he all but purred back at her, staring her down with dark gray eyes.
The stiff line of his shoulders had gone lax.
His damned tone, though…
Helena blinked. She’d never heard Sirius sound like that before—playful, yet intense and rumbling in a way that had a thrill shooting down her spine, like the adrenaline rush at the top of a Wronski Feint.
“No one likes a braggart,” she informed him a second too late.
“Really?” Sirius smirked. “Because I’ve always been told confidence is key.”
“And if you’d stop flirting,” James drawled, “You could confidently tell us how your part of the plan is coming along.”
Sirius broke eye contact with Helena, his brows furrowing into a sharp V. He coughed once, almost awkwardly, then his face cleared and his typical easy grin reappeared.
“It’s not my fault Hellcat is so distracting,” he said, tossing Helena an exaggerated wink, all traces of the previous few second’s…whatever-that-was…gone like a mirage.
“Now!” Sirius exclaimed, and with a flourish he drew forth a square wooden box the size of his palm from his pocket, holding it out before him for everyone to see. It was light brown, plain and unadorned but for a small round hole an inch in diameter on one of its six sides. “Allow me to present to you… The Presenter!”
A beat, then, “What’s it do?” Marlene asked.
“Patience McKinnon.” Sirius smiled smugly and turned to Lily, holding out his free hand. “You have the first golem ready, yeah?”
Lily nodded and opened up her bag. The snake she pulled out was two feet long and reddish-brown with a dark zig-zag pattern down its back. It hung weirdly limp in her hands, the only sign of life being the small expansion at its sides which indicated breathing. It was a bit creepy, honestly, but it was also the reason they had chosen to use golems in the first place: the things, much like a statue, could only move and perform actions under the power of an animation charm. They were an oddity of magical engineering, for while a transfigured animal at its base remained an inanimate object, the transfigured animal would operate under its own power like a real animal. Golems, on the other hand, were real flesh and blood, but capable of no independent action.
“Oh, no, no, no. You didn’t!” Dorcas cried, shrinking back against the headboard of Remus’s bed.
“What?”
“Is that an adder?” Dorcas asked, pointing her finger accusingly at Lily.
Lily clutched the limp snake to her chest. “They’re the only snakes native to Scotland,” she said defensively.
“They’re venomous!”
“We’re not going to make them bite anyone!”
“I mean…we could?”
Lily and Dorcas both turned to stare at Marlene, aghast.
“People are arseholes.” She shrugged, entirely unrepentant. “I’m only saying…we could.”
Alice pinched the bridge of her nose. “Marlene…no,” she said with an air of long-suffering fortitude.
Helena was leaning the full weight of her body against Sirius’s leg at this point, tears building in her eyes as she silently cackled over the remarks that seemed so unexpected to nobody but her.
“Great,” Sirius said, patting Helena’s head as he spoke, “Well now that Alice has stopped Marlene from murdering anyone—”
“Not murder. Just poison. A little bit.” Marlene pinched her thumb and forefinger together to illustrate her point.
“And I am in full support of your future criminal undertakings,” Sirius informed her. “But first! The snake if you would please, Evans.”
Lily handed the golem over without further protest from anyone. Sirius spent a few moments running his wand along its spine. He tapped each of its eyes, then tapped the presenter box. Then with a softly muttered “Animus” he set the snake down and they all watched it stir to life.
The snake tensed, its body finally losing its creepy limpness. It remained still for a second before, with a few rippling curves of its torso, it slipped to the edge of the bed then down onto the floor.
“Oh hell no!” Dorcas said as the snake began to slither towards Remus’s bed. “Keep that thing on your side of the room, Black!”
“Y-yeah, Sirius. We-we don’t need it any closer to see that it works,” Pettigrew chimed in his fervent agreement.
Without a word, the snake stopped obediently in the center of the room. It lifted its head to regard everyone, a full third of its body raised in the air as it slowly twisted to look at each of them. Then, as quickly as it had gained life, the snake’s body sagged, animation cut off.
Sirius thrust his arm out before him, palm up cradling the presenter box.
“Mischief Managed,” he intoned with an air of solemn gravitas.
Light spilled from the hole in the box like it was a movie projector, but unlike a muggle movie projector, the light from the presenter box did not need to land on a physical surface to display its images. Instead it acted more like a sci-fi hologram, focussing into a clear display in the open air eight feet in front of Sirius. On that display they were able to watch through the snake’s eyes as it slid off the bed, as it twisted to look at each of them in turn. The view was surprisingly normal. The colors were muted, and though not necessarily fuzzy, items across the room were more difficult to make out than they would have been with the naked human eye. There were none of the heat gradations Helena associated with night vision goggles from Dudley’s military video games, but she supposed that not all species of snake possessed heat vision. The sound though, when Dorcas’s “Oh hell no!” echoed from each of the four walls of the dorm, was crystal clear.
“Well, I’d say that was a roaring success!” James clapped cheerfully. “Moony, looks like you’re up!”
Remus raised his hand to his brow and flicked it in a lazy salute as he climbed off his bed. “We should test this layered over both the animation and recording charms,” he said to Sirius.
So Sirius repeated his earlier spells, and when the snake once again stirred from its pseudo-grave, Remus pointed his wand and cast, “Vox Serpentis.”
The snake turned at some silent command from Sirius and slithered to a stop a foot before James and Lily. Its forked tongue flicked out twice, then:
“Humansssssssssssss.”
“Hello, snake. Fancy seeing you here,” James chirped, smiling down at the venomous animal.
“A ssssspeaker! I have never met a sssspeaker before! It isssss an honor…Masssster.”
The snake dipped its head in a facsimile of a bow, and Helena absolutely lost it. She was still leaning against Sirius’s leg, but now she needed to wrap her arms about his knee to support herself.
“You good there, Hellcat?” Sirius grinned down at her.
But she could only continue to laugh, rolling her forehead back and forth as she shook her head against his thigh. “Snakes—” She flapped her hand vaguely in the golem’s direction. “Snakes don’t sound anything like that!”
“I thought you said it sounds like English to you?” Remus said, but he was smiling too, not offended in the least by her reaction to his spell work. “That you couldn’t tell the difference unless you thought about it?”
“I can’t! But that—” Helena snorted, a few stray giggles spilling from her chest before she regained control of herself. “It sounds like English in the moment, but if I think back on it…It’s like the sun! I hear ‘sun’ but I also hear ‘bright-hot-light-in-the-sky-need-to-bask-in-it.’ Or people, people don't have names, not really. Everything is conceptual to a snake, less actual language than the impression of an idea. I could say ‘Wormtail’ but a snake would hear, er, ‘Smells like Rat-but-too-big-hard-to-eat.’ Or if it was a really big snake, it might hear ‘Smells like small Rat-but-looks-like-big-juicy-meal.’”
“You saying Peter smells like a rat?” Sirius asked, mirth dancing in his eyes.
Helena shrugged. “To a snake,” she said, taking a bit too much pleasure in the bloodless fear clear on Pettigrew’s pale face. “And they definitely don’t have that kind of deference for humans. If they find out a person can understand them, they mostly just want to be pointed in the direction of food. Or to be let out of a cage. Or to be picked up so they can bask in our body heat. They are not all that complicated, honestly.”
“Hmmm,” Remus scratched his chin, “That’s fascinating, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to imitate that kind of dual-comprehension with a spell.”
“Does it matter?” Alice asked. “Helena is the only one who will know the difference.”
Everyone in the group looked around. After a few seconds of silence, they seemed to throw out a collective shrug, and it was decided: their prank was a go.
~
“Want some company?” Sirius asked Helena when she came down to the common room dressed in workout clothes that afternoon.
He was already dressed in his own set of joggers, today paired with a Rolling Stones t-shirt. He wore his ebony wand in an equally black dragon-hide holster on his right forearm, which highlighted the hard line of muscle there quite effectively when Sirius quickly flexed his hand in what might have been a bout of nervous fidgeting in a less confident boy.
Quidditch, Helena noted, was excellent for building upper-body strength, if less impactful on one’s cardiovascular health.
“You know my condition,” she reminded him.
“And I’ll do it right now if you’ll join me for a pre-practice jog?”
Helena considered saying no for all of half a second, but running was good for her training routine too, and it wasn’t like Sirius was who she was trying to squeeze out of dueling practice with her 5K condition, so the sooner he managed the run in the time limit, the better.
“Alright,” she agreed.
She looked to James then, their only other year mate currently in the common room, to see if he wanted to join them. But he was lounged back, arms and legs spread out to take up as much room as possible on the couch.
“Lily’s not planning on joining you, is she?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder towards the stairwell which led up to the girl’s dorms.
“No,” Helena drew the word out slowly as an idea came to her. “But, you know, it’s not a bad idea for you to try and become her exercise buddy. It’s a built-in activity for you to do together, and there’s no such thing as an awkward silence if you’re both out of breath.”
When James turned back to her, his eyes were twinkling brightly enough to put stars to shame. “Yeah, you know…that is a great idea. And you’ve already gone and made running mandatory for us.” His eyes flicked to Sirius, somehow gaining an even brighter sparkle. “And—”
“And Prongs can wax lyrical about your brilliance some other time,” Sirius said even as he grabbed Helena’s hand and began towing her towards the portrait hole door. “We’ve got places to be, daylight to burn, kilometers to conquer, etcetera, etcetera, and all that.”
“You kids have fun!” James called after them. “Don’t do anything I would do! Or do! But make sure you record the results for me!”
It hit Helena in a sudden flash what life might have been like growing up with James for a father. She’d had them before, vague insights and fantasies that always left her longing, but never so clearly as just now.
Helena loved her father from this life with her whole heart, though a more different dad from the type James would have been, she could not have conjured up. For all his shady dealings, Marcus Gaunt had been a straight-shooting sort of man, all business all the time right up until the moment of the fall when he would transform into the world’s biggest adrenaline junkie. It had made him a steady presence, dependable and solid as a rock, though jokes had been few and far between. But with the general instability ripe in every other aspect of her life, Helena figured he was exactly the kind of father she’d needed.
But she also knew a lifetime of lonely memories, of countless days where she’d been ignored or locked away in a small, dark cupboard. If life had been kinder, she, Harry Potter, would have thrived with a father like James. And that crystal-clear knowledge filled her chest with an ache she couldn’t quite shake even as she and Sirius made their way outside and began to run.
It stayed with her when Sirius did, indeed, manage to complete his 5K on time. When she led him up to the seventh floor, when she grinned and congratulated him and laughed at his shock as the Room of Requirement was revealed, a secret, she informed him, that he could not share with the others until they too successfully completed their 5Ks.
That ache remained, boring like a parasite into her bones.
“No,” she huffed at Sirius twenty minutes into their lesson. “I told you, basics first!”
“Yeah,” he said, rolling first his shoulders and then his neck. “And it turns out that’s as exciting as it sounded when you first explained spell chaining to me.”
Helena grit her teeth. “You still need to know the basic sequences.”
“Do I?” Sirius arched his brow. “Come on, what do you think is more predictable? A basic sequence everyone knows—”
“Everyone except you, you mean?”
“—Or a sequence filled with prank spells?”
Helena squinted at him. “I’m sorry, are you trying to argue that you using prank spells in a duel would not be predictable.”
Sirius raised his pointer finger. Lowered it.
Helena nodded. “Do sequence one again,” she told him.
Sirius groaned. “Can I at least practice it while we duel each other?” he asked, giving the stationary target Helena had set him up with a dirty look.
At this point, Helena was just irritated enough with Sirius’s attitude to agree.
“Great idea,” she said, marching up a fresh set of stairs onto a dueling platform even as the Room raised it from the previously flat ground for them. “I’ll stick to sequence one as well.”
Sirius’s brow furrowed, and Helena had to suppress a slightly spiteful smile. She wondered how long it would take him to realize he did not have to begin a chain at the beginning of an established sequence. Helena was learning to approach all of her chain sequences more creatively, but this particular sequence she could have performed perfectly ten shots of vodka deep after two days without sleep.
Sirius was not going to know what hit him.
Literally. For it only took Helena three seconds in their first duel to lay him out flat, and half that in their second duel.
By their third, though, Sirius apparently remembered dodging was a thing, and Helena’s easy domination grew a bit more hard-won, and by their eighth duel, Sirius managed to go an entire minute without suffering a hit. But with his greater success, it seemed, came a greater sense of flippancy.
Helena cast a stunner. She saw Sirius duck the jet of red light, laughing at her.
His face was lit with exhilarated delight.
“Come on, you can do better than that!” he yelled, his voice echoing around the room.
Helena was purposefully casting more slowly than her countless hours of practice had made her capable of casting. Even so, her wand was already curving through the motions of a dizziness jinx, and when Sirius had ducked, he’d left himself open. Her next spell would hit him squarely on the chest.
But Helena had seen this play before.
Sirius had been older, his handsome face wasted by Azkaban, but his expression had been the same then as it was now, his words an exact match.
Helena barely registered the unpleasant buzz of suppressed magic in her hand as she came to an abrupt halt.
“Would you stop messing around?” she snapped.
Sirius straightened from his ready position to mirror Helena’s stiff-backed stance.
“I’m not messing around.” His dark brows lowered in a straight line over his hooded gray eyes. “I was enjoying our duel. Or is that not allowed?”
“Not if you can only enjoy yourself if you're trash-talking your opponent.”
Sirius clenched his jaw. “What?” he jeered, “You can’t take a little heat?”
“Maybe if your skill matched your words,” Helena savagely replied.
Sirius flushed. His scowl grew more pronounced.
“You asked me to train you,” Helena spat. “I’m not going to do that if you can’t be serious.”
“I’m always—”
“No! We’re not joking, remember?”
“Well if we’re not joking, can I just say you really need to chill out?”
“You want me to chill out?” Helena wanted to scream. “We’re not here training for some stupid competition! We’re here to train for war! So excuse me if I don’t want you treating this like it’s a game. You can’t joke around and taunt your opponent. It’s going to get you killed, Sirius!”
Helena’s voice cracked; her throat closed up, halting her rant.
Sirius’s scowl went slack. He stared at her with wide eyes as he stepped closer, one hand stretched towards her, the other held up placatingly. “Come on Hellcat, I wouldn’t do that in a fight with real Death Eaters.”
You already have, she wanted to shout.
“Then don’t do it here,” she croaked instead.
Sirius’s eyes held a note of panic as he quickly agreed, but Helena barely had the wherewithal to notice that detail, for her attention was consumed with the burning behind her eyes, with the way her throat had grown tight and clogged, the way she couldn’t seem to draw a full breath.
“No, come on now, don’t cry,” Sirius said pleadingly. His eyes darted about the room uncomfortably before he looked back at her and inched a half step closer. “I’m sorry, okay? You’re right, this isn’t a game. I promise I’ll take everything more seriously. So…so if you could maybe stop crying?”
“I’m not crying on purpose!” Helena managed to choke out around a harsh sob, swiping at her eyes furiously.
Sirius made a sympathetic noise low in his throat, which sounded more like a distressed whine than anything else, and inched another step closer.
And then he was hugging her, and Helena all but melted into his embrace, burying her face against his chest. And the room must have sensed her need, because Sirius was lowering her down to sit on a fluffy loveseat which had magically appeared behind them, rocking her back and forth as he gently shushed her.
For her part, Helena didn’t even understand why she was crying. She’d been having a good day—no nightmares, she’d left her early morning practice session invigorated and spent the first half of her day surrounded by her friends, enjoying the easy companionship that came with a lighthearted spot of prank planning. She felt safe here, despite the recent battle. She had people here, and they weren’t just familiar faces anymore. They cared about her.
So it didn’t make sense for her to break down now.
Helena had spent the four days after her parents died crying. Those first days after she’d woken up to her mess of a merged mind, she’d done nothing but cry. But her tears had not helped then when she’d been alone and stranded and grief stricken, and they weren’t helping now when her circumstances were quite the opposite.
Despite how firmly she tried telling herself this, though, she couldn’t seem to stop.
It seemed to go on forever, but Sirius never let her go, and eventually, finally, Helena calmed. Her face was still pressed to Sirius’s chest. Her hands were curled into his shirt. And perhaps she should have moved, but a combination of embarrassment and contentment kept her in place.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I don’t know why…”
Sirius squeezed her somehow closer. “You’re okay,” he mumbled into her hair.
They fell quiet again. Helena turned her head slightly. Like this, she could hear Sirius’s heartbeat, steady and soothing, against her ear. The scent of his cologne was warm and inviting in her nose. When she peeked her eyes open, she could see that the Room had transformed around them. There was a fire crackling in a marble hearth. The walls had shrunk, turned wood-paneled and cozy. And a thick blanket had found its way across their laps.
One of Sirius’s hands trailed up her back, digging into her hair at the base of her scalp. He began to lightly massage his fingers, and Helena released a deep sigh. She kind of hoped they could stay curled up together like this for the rest of the day. She hadn’t felt this at ease in…a very long time.
“With all the gossip, I didn’t ask after Hogsmeade,” Sirius said after a moment, his voice vibrating by her ear, “But how are you holding up?”
“…M’fine,” Helena mumbled.
“Yeah? This is completely unrelated then?”
Yes, she couldn’t tell him. “I didn’t ask how you were holding up either,” she said instead.
Sirius shrugged. “I’ve never fought in a battle before, but Voldemort has been a problem for years now, and I’ve seen the aftermath. It’s not the same, but…”
He shrugged again.
“I can’t imagine how it must be for you though, moving to a country at war.”
He shook his head, and this time it was Helena’s turn to shrug.
“I knew what I was getting into.”
“Did you? I figured we must not have gotten much international attention when you enrolled, but—”
“No, the rest of the world knows, they just don’t care enough to make it their problem.”
“Why the hell would you move here then?”
“I wanted—I needed—to help.”
Sirius pulled away so he could get a proper look at her. “You came here with the intention of fighting?”
Helena looked away, gnawing at her lip. “I can make a difference,” she said, cringing internally because she knew how ridiculous that sounded.
And Sirius clearly agreed with her internal assessment.
“Not to knock on your competence,” he said slowly, “Because you’re good—really bloody good—but what do you honestly think one soldier is going to change? I know you’re not that arrogant.”
This coming from Sirius Black.
Helena glared up at him, though she made no move to slip out of his loose embrace.
“It’s not arrogance,” she insisted with deep conviction. “I know I can make a difference.”
Because I know what happens to you if I don’t, she didn’t say.
Sirius rolled his eyes. “What are you? Some kind of seer?” he asked sarcastically.
But Helena must have tensed despite the wrongness of his guess because Sirius’s eyes all but bugged out of his head.
“Wait, are you a seer?” he laughed breathlessly. “Merlin! You are, aren’t you!”
“What? No!” Helena shook her head.
But Sirius wasn’t listening to her. He shifted his hand to cup her cheek, his eyes so bloody sincere as he said, “You can trust me. I promise I won’t tell anyone, not even James.”
“Thanks,” Helena said, “But I’m not a seer.”
Sirius squinted down at her, searching her face for any sign that she was lying. Whatever he saw, it had him blinking dumbly, his expression abruptly softening with deep sympathy.
“Oh,” he whispered sadly, “You fell into a Dreamer’s Pond, didn’t you?”
Which was a shockingly on-point if wildly incorrect guess.
“Those aren’t real,” Helena said.
Her voice wobbled.
Sirius eyed her knowingly.
“I know you can’t talk about it,” he assured her. “Magic of the Ponds and keeping Fate’s secrets and all that rot. Don’t worry, I know better than to ask, and I’ll make sure the others stay off your back too, yeah?”
He was so solemn and earnest as he said it, so sure that she had truly fallen into one of those mystical ponds, that she’d been cursed with knowledge, seen visions of a possible future, able to act on them but never to speak of them for fear of drawing Fate’s damning ire.
He looked terrified for her. And that, more than anything, had her telling him, “It wasn’t a Pond. It was the Veil—”
“No!” Sirius shouted in sudden panic. “No, don’t say anything!”
Helena snapped her mouth shut.
“Magic gave you a gift, Hellcat,” he said intensely. “If anyone else is supposed to know, Magic will let a seer have a nice, proper prophecy.”
“That’s it?” Helena asked. “You’re just going to let this go?”
She didn’t know if she felt more guilty or relieved when he pulled her back against his chest in another tight hug.
“Of course,” he promised her like there had never been any other option.
.
.
.
.
.
.
FUTURE OUTTAKE: This is vague enough that I am quite sure it does not actually give away anything (at least nothing everyone reading this story couldn't have seen coming from a mile away), but if you are one of those people who absolutely despise spoilers in any form or fashion, I would skip reading this outtake.
Hermione Granger shifted nervously in her seat for the nth time. It was a big, beautifully upholstered chair with a set of nice, plush cushions, but it may as well have been a straight-backed, steel torture device she was so nervous.
The Marauder Foundation was…everything.
And she, Hermione Granger, at just fifteen years old and still months out from her dreaded OWL exams, had an interview for one of their ten coveted summer internship positions.
It was a dream, a fantasy, the stuff girls wrote thirty-page diary entries about.
She honestly thought she might puke.
Hermione had read up on the organization’s entire history, of course. She could reel off the dates of all its major accomplishments. She could list all its large donors. She knew the names of every politician or celebrity who had publicly endorsed it. She could recite verbatim, from memory, the Foundation’s publicly stated goals, as well as its honor code just in case her interviewer should ask her that. And its financials—
With a sense of dread, Hermione realized she had forgotten to follow up on the numbers from last year’s Mischief Gala.
Oh, they were definitely going to ask her about that! It was so recent! And actually pertinent to the running of the organization, unlike the list of all those celebrity endorsements Hermione had wasted her time memorizing!
“Miss Granger?” the receptionist chose that moment to call out.
Hermione’s head snapped up.
The receptionist offered her a kind smile. “You can head on in,” he told her.
Hermione could only offer him a weak smile in return. Her legs felt like jelly beneath her as she made her way past his desk to the door of the interview room. She reached out, heart in her throat, twisted the knob, stepped over the threshold, and stopped dead.
Because there, sitting behind the interview desk, smiling at Hermione in a way she could only describe as fond, was the instantly recognizable face of Helena Black.
The woman behind the lightning bolt.
The reason that was the symbol synonymous with one of the most influential organizations in the Wizarding World and not some other, more on-the-nose emblem.
“Come on, Hellcat, picture it,” said a man’s voice, and Hermione suddenly realized she’d been staring so hard at Helena Black, she’d completely missed the handsome man perched on the corner of the desk.
Sirius Black. Helena Black’s husband. A man almost as famous as his wife. The man behind the woman behind the lightning bolt.
If Hermione could find the wherewithal to unstick her feet from the ground, she would turn and run back out to the receptionist. Because surely she was in the wrong room. Surely Helena and Sirius Black were not here to interview a summer intern. Hermione was not supposed to meet them until after she’d proven her value as an employee!
“An entire week without the kids,” Sirius Black continued on, oblivious to the turmoil his mere presence was inciting. “Just you, me, that little red bikini—”
“I'm going to have to stop you before you traumatize my interviewee.”
Black paused. His head tilted lazily in Hermione’s direction. His gray eyes seemed to pierce her in place for all of the single second he took to scan her from head to toe, then he barked out a deep belly laugh, head thrown back and everything.
“Looks like it might be too late on that front, Luv,” he said.
Helena Black snorted, a much less delicate sound than Hermione would have expected from such a delicately-featured woman.
“Be that as it may,” she said. “I’m supposed to be working.”
Her husband held his hands up in surrender. “Just giving you some food for thought, Hellcat.”
“Mmhmm, and I’ll be sure to give your suggestion all the attention it deserves. Later. Now shoo,” she said, waving her hand.
“Kitty’s got claws,” Sirius Black grumbled as he hopped off the desk, but he was smiling as he leaned down to kiss his wife’s cheek.
“Do you like cats?” Hermione asked dumbly, only to flush straight down to her kneecaps when the two adults turned to regard her, utterly mortified that those were her first words to the woman she’d idolized since she first learned she was a witch.
A wide smile slowly stretched its way across Helena Black’s face. Her green eyes positively danced as she cast a sly glance up at her husband.
“Oh, I’m more of a dog person, really,” she said.
~
Naturally, Hermione Granger found herself with a job after that interview.