fatal love

chapter 123

"I heard your uncle died," Marlene said sadly the next day, as the two of them walked to Muggle Studies together. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Sirius shrugged, "I'm not."

She tilted her head at him.

"He was a Black, Marls," Sirius reminded her. "Scum of the earth, just like the rest of them."

She shrugged. "Well, then, I'm sorry he didn't die sooner."

"That's more like it," Sirius grinned.

"So many people dying right now," Marlene said thoughtfully, "I guess we only have the capacity to care about so many. No point wasting sadness on someone who isn't worth it..."

"Merlin, that's a bit morbid, innit?" Sirius laughed. "What's got into you?"

"Did you not hear about people dying?"

Sirius groaned. "Can we not talk about the bloody war, please? We're not fighting in it, it doesn't have to consume our lives."

She raised an eyebrow. "That's a selfish way of looking at things, don't you think?"

"Right, sorry, we'll hold a minute silence for every death in the paper," Sirius said sarcastically. "We'll never talk again, how about that?"

"Fine, fine," Marlene said, rolling her eyes, "we'll talk about something else. How's Remus?"

"Good, I guess," Sirius sighed, "things could be better, but... we're trying."

Things had been a little off, again, this morning. Sirius figured that maybe that was just part of fighting, sometimes it just took a little while to bounce back. It was so much better than it had been, though. He knew Remus wasn't about to up and leave him because he didn't want to be under Dumbledore's thumb. And Sirius understood, when he actually thought about things from Remus' perspective, why Remus wasn't going to change his mind, and why he did trust their headmaster so much. He didn't like it, he didn't agree with it, but he couldn't change it either.

So they just had to make it work. He thought they were both over-compensating a little, at the moment. Being overly nice to each other, the easy dynamic not as easy as it normally was.

But he was just going to push through it. And they'd only actually started talking again a couple of days ago, it was bound to be a little difficult at first. That didn't mean he wouldn't choose a little bit of awkwardness over the other option without blinking an eye.

"Everything okay with you two?" Marlene asked, frowning.

"It will be," Sirius said firmly. "It's... the war. It's getting in the way, we were fighting about it. I think the fighting's done now, though. Now it's just... getting back to how we were."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Nah," Sirius said. "It's fine. Just another reason to get pissed about five years of this shit and no change."

She placed her hand on his arm and rubbed it comfortingly. "Don't stress, love," she said softly. "You two love each other, everything else is just background noise."

Sirius was about to respond, when Marlene suddenly snatched her arm away and put a foot of space between them.

"What?" he asked, staring at her. "What did I do?"

"Uh, nothing," she laughed nervously, but she wasn't looking at him. He followed her eye line, and saw that she was looking at a group of Hufflepuffs.

He turned back to her, grinning widely. "Marlene McKinnon," he whispered delightedly, "which one is it?"