The Boy Who Killed God {Sirius Black | Marauders Era Fanfiction}

Frankenstein's Monster

That night, he'd had that goddamned dream again. The nightmare, he'd never be able to properly define.

He'd stood, entranced, in a faceless, silent crowd, tracing the scars on Remus's face, trying to decipher the right question in the rough topography of Remus's skin.

Merlin, how Sirius had begged and bartered with the universe to stay in the warm comfort of the dream-maybe-nightmare.

(Nightmare, he decided with an air of finality. But only because the dream had ended with the cruelty of the breaking dawn.)

He'd woken against his better judgment with the taste of the future lingering on his tongue and a new resolve thrumming in his heart. He wanted that future: the one where Remus Lupin had held him close, as though the sky was falling around them, and had tugged at Sirius's lips with his teeth, muttering increasingly frustrated variations of, "That goddamned tongue ring."

He wanted that future desperately, irrevocably. Inconsolably.

So, he'd changed his line of questioning entirely, in a frantic, desperate belief that the right question might tether him to that future before it slipped through his fingers, lost in the oblivion of nothing. And this time, instead of mere passive questioning—waiting helplessly for the universe to bend to his will and reveal its secrets—there'd been action.

He'd accompanied James on an epic, world-ending mission to flood the Slytherin dorms. (It'd been moderately successful. There'd been a few carefully aimed constipation hexes, an obsessive-compulsive potion unknowingly supplied by the King of Gryffindor in the guise of extra credit in Slughorn's class, and a "culturally exploratory" dinner of Mexican burritos that Peter had convinced the house elves to serve, and poof. Every toilet in the Slytherin dorms had been clogged due to... excessive flushing. There'd been a foot of standing water in the dungeon for a week, not that Sirius had been gloating.)

Beyond the chaos that was in his very nature to reap and sow, Sirius had kept himself busy. He'd sat with Lily in the library, each of them vying for top of their class. He'd attended tutoring with McGonagall, where she'd studied him in turn, as cautious and curious as the cat that lived in her soul, but she'd continued to call him by his first name.

And, each night, he'd read to Remus on the roof. Remus, who, by Sirius's count, had been perfectly damn capable of reading to himself, thank you very much, but Sirius hadn't minded. Remus said he'd wanted to see the story through Sirius's eyes, and... That mattered, somehow. More than he knew how to put into words. So, he'd read Frankenstein, and Remus listened, even as he gave no indication of a change of heart. Even as Remus had cringed and fidgeted with a loose string on his sweater at the creature's every tragic, murderous rampage.

A few nights later, Sirius had both laughed and cried his way through The Picture of Dorian Gray, simply because Remus had referred to Oscar Wilde as quintessential. He'd loved it, of course, but not as much as Frankenstein.

Dorian Gray made a choice to sell his soul. Frankenstein's creature was damned to exist without one from the very start.

The difference was, well...

Quintessential.

Then, he'd read Call of the Wild. It'd been a first for the both of them, and one Lily had quite literally thrown in his face on several different occasions.

Sirius sobbed through the end, when Buck tore his way through the flesh of those who killed his master. He'd been alone, stranded on a field of corpses, and left to become a ghost in the cool, winter breeze.

Remus had been absolutely mortified throughout the entire book, but he hadn't said a word to stop Sirius from reading the end. If, a few days later, he'd seen Remus shove the book back into Lily's hands and whisper some choice adjectives, Sirius hadn't been about to bring it up.