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

Ye Who Enter

DECEMBER 18, 1971

Sirius didn't stay in the compartment at the end of the train with James and Peter for very long. Not even long enough to stash his bag, really, but he couldn't stand it. James made three separate, aborted attempts at conversation and Peter just kept looking at him, like maybe it was the last time he'd see Sirius alive.

Wasn't that a comforting thought.

Sirius mumbled an excuse—he wasn't even sure what, really—and stood. James stood with him and pulled Sirius into a bone-crushing hug.

"You'll be fine, Black," James said into Sirius's hair, but it was forced and hurt that much more. "Just... be brave, okay?"

Sirius wasn't brave.

He was stupid and reckless and he'd somehow conned his way into Gryffindor, just like McGonagall thought. Just like James had thought, those first few days. Nothing about Sirius Black was real, not the power of his name, nor his friends, nor anything that happened the past few months.

He was an empty shell, standing on the cusp of hellfire, ready to be forged into whatever his mother wanted.

Peter patted his arm and muttered something, but Sirius didn't quite catch it. He unlatched the compartment door and made his way through the corridor.

He felt the nothing-pain of Peter's hand long after the echoes of James's hug faded away.

Nothing always felt worse.

It reminded him of who he was—what he was—and that horrible, damning tattoo on his chest that made sure he could never escape the course mapped out for him.

That was real.

Fuck.

Narcissa made a disgruntled huff when Sirius slipped into their compartment. She crossed her arms, moved to the seat next to Lucius Malfoy. Sirius slipped into Narcissa's vacant seat and threw his bag down next to him, hopefully to dissuade any other Slytherins from thinking they're welcome to sit next to him.

"I'm missing Slughorn's Christmas party because of you," Narcissa spat at him. "Mother wouldn't have had to push Andromeda's engagement if she hadn't tried to help you run away."

Something dark and cannibalistic settled in the pit of Sirius's stomach.

Andromeda's eminent engagement to Julius Fawley was his fault.

No one escaped the Warden's punishment.

Lucius Malfoy traced the line of the pale, pink scar on his left cheek.

"You're fucked, Black," Malfoy sneered. "What do you think your mother will have to say about your little half-breed boyfriend?"

Remus.

No.

Something wild and vicious flared to life in Sirius's veins, something that felt eerily similar to the insanity of a man who was already damned. Magic danced between Sirius's fingertips, sparking and crackling to the surface, ready to be released. His right hand itched to draw his wand—not so much for practical use in a potential duel, but for the sheer intent and intimidation factor of facing one's enemies with a wand drawn—but the wand was packed away in his trunk, and Sirius was well aware that both Malfoy and Narcissa knew he didn't need a wand to be a major contender in a duel.

"You don't touch him," Sirius hissed, baring his teeth. "You don't fucking look at him. You don't say his name."

"He's one, pathetic little half-breed. I will speak to him and treat him as he deserves. You can't make me do anything, Black."

"I'll make you a deal, Malfoy," Sirius said, surprised at the calmness and clarity in his own voice, despite the panicked mantra in his head of Keep Remus safe, god-fucking-damnit. Sirius gestured to Malfoy's scar. "You get one shot at me. Same spell, aimed at me, one shot. I won't fight back."

Malfoy waved him off. "I am already owed revenge for that, Black. There's no point in—"

"Then, in addition to your revenge," Sirius said, swallowing the fear that welled up inside him, "I'll grant you a favour."

Something flared in Malfoy's eyes as he leered at Sirius. "A favour?"

"Yes."

Fuck.

Malfoy quirked an eyebrow. "Anything?"

"Anything."

Shit shit shit.

Malfoy leaned back in his seat and crossed his arm, that wicked smile still plastered on his stupid face. "You really want to make that deal? You don't even know what Lupin is. Not really. If you did, you'd—"

"You really want to talk me out of this, Malfoy?" Sirius snapped back. He didn't give a damn about whatever Malfoy had on Remus. It didn't fucking matter. "I'm the Black heir. More than a few people would kill to have me in their debt."

There's no way that ends well, the horribly logical voice in his head whispered. Sirius agreed with it, wholeheartedly, but this, at least, would keep Remus safe from Malfoy, from his influence and wrath, and keep him well out of reach of the long, malicious claws of Walburga Black.

He'd do whatever it took, pay any price.

"What guarantee do I have that you will keep your word? Or that won't fight back when I take my revenge?"

There was a wary look in Malfoy's eyes as they tracked over Sirius's hands, well aware of the magic that flowed just beneath his fingertips.

Sirius almost laughed, because goddamnit, despite everything, Lucius Malfoy was afraid of him.

"An Unbreakable Vow," Sirius said, before his mind could fully catch up with his mouth, but it didn't matter. Because that was the only thing that would keep Remus safe.

Malfoy balked a little at the idea. "You're serious?"

Sirius smirked and held out his hand. "Always and forever."

Malfoy reached across the aisle and grasped Sirius's hand around the wrist.

"Cissa, bind the vow," Sirius said, gritting his teeth against the nothing he felt when he touched Malfoy.

Nothing was so much fucking worse than pain.

Narcissa glanced between the two of them, her mouth gaping open, catching flies. "Lucius, do you think maybe you should—"

"Narcissa, do it," Malfoy said.

Her mouth snapped shut and, hesitantly, Narcissa drew her wand from the inside of her robes. She flicked it over their joined hands. Red tendrils of flame trickled out from her wand, binding Malfoy and Sirius together.

"I, Sirius Orion Black, solemnly swear that I will grant Lucius Abraxas Malfoy his unanswered revenge, of equal proportion to the Sectumsempra scar he received by my hand, as well as grant one favour, with no time limit or further stipulations, in exchange for his oath to never betray Remus Lupin under any circumstances."

Malfoy narrowed his eyes, seemed to hesitate over the wording, just as Narcissa drew in a sharp breath. The tendrils of flame twisted around their joined wrists, licking at their skin, but never burning.

"Say it, Malfoy," Sirius gritted out.

"I will not betray Remus Lupin."

Sirius dug his fingernails into Malfoy's wrists, almost hard enough to draw blood. "All of it, you arsehole."

Malfoy's eyes flared with intention, with hatred and malice and the horrifying promise of revenge. "I will never betray Remus Lupin under any circumstances."

Around them, the flames flickered, solidified, bound them together, then in a rush, evaporated into Sirius's and Malfoy's chests.

They were both breathing hard as the magic threw them apart, the oath bound in the space between them, written on the gates of eternity.

Narcissa put her wand away without any further comment.

Malfoy let out a broken laugh. "Your loss, Black. I know things about Lupin that would make you shit yourself. He fucking belongs in Azkaban."

"So do you, Malfoy, but here we are," Sirius found himself saying.

Malfoy scoffed. "You're still fucked. Even if your mother doesn't know about Lupin."

The thing was, Sirius didn't fucking care. Sirius figured he was damned and forgotten anyway.

This way, Remus was safe.

Of all the devils to whom he could have sold his soul to save Remus Lupin, Lucius Malfoy was, at the very least, petty and predictable.

Malfoy, he could deal with.

It was everything else at Grimmauld Place that absolutely fucking terrified him.

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

Regulus was standing between their parents when the Hogwarts Express pulled into King's Cross.

Sirius's breath caught in his throat, and any sense of momentary triumph he had from his deal with Malfoy evaporated in a single heartbeat.

Walburga Black was the picture of stone-cold dissonance: malice and control, destruction and conformity. She wore elegant, embroidered emerald robes that covered every inch of skin from her neck down. Her hair, pinned in a neat bun on top of her head, was as black as her soul, showing no signs of age or decay, just the regality that came with her name and title.

Her upturned nose swept over the crowded platform, daring anyone to come close enough to actually touch her. She was a statue: horrifically beautiful, cold, and dead to the world, but underneath the surface, a dangerous cocktail of skill, toil, and artistry.

His father was the equal and opposite of his mother. Tall, and far more muscular than Sirius ever hoped to be, Orion Black was king and knight and deadly assassin, all at once. He emanated power and regality and the pure nobility of the Black name. His eyes were like the thestrals—shadows unto themselves—but instead of a tragic sadness, Orion's eyes told tales of cunning deceit and battlefields soaked in blood.

It took every ounce of the Gryffindor courage he may have, at one point, possessed for Sirius not to turn around and run screaming in the other direction.

Or over to James Potter, across the platform, surrounded by his beautiful mother and greying father.

James kept waving at Sirius, trying to catch his eye. Goddamnit.

Sirius bit his lip hard enough that he tasted blood, but he pointedly refused to look over at James. He felt his mother's gaze, watching him for any sign of weakness, for any tick, for any last minute ammunition she could use against him.

Not that she needed it. She already had plenty.

He wasn't going to give her James Potter too.

A gloved hand clamped tightly on Regulus's shoulder, hard enough to bruise, though Regulus's face mirrored the indifference on their mother's.

Sirius put one foot in front of the other, over towards them, ducking occasionally to avoid contact with other reuniting family units. He squared his jaw, ran his hands down the front of his robes, and stood ramrod straight in front of his brother and parents.

"Mother. Father," Sirius greeted, more surprised than anything that his voice remained even remotely steady.

Walburga frowned, but didn't say anything.

Orion drew his wand, and Merlin, Sirius couldn't help the flinch. His father wouldn't dare hex him here, would he? Not with so many witnesses. No, he wouldn't—

But Orion just pointed his wand at Sirius's trunk and shrunk it, then picked up the tiny little thing to put in his pocket.

Up close, Regulus looked just as terrified as Sirius, his grey eyes wide and panicked, greedily looking Sirius up and down and up again, just to make sure he was alright. Regulus opened his mouth, ready to say something.

Sirius's eyes flashed and he gave a tiny shake of his head.

Now was not the time for words.

Sirius felt more than saw Lucius Malfoy slither up behind him, Narcissa not far behind.

"Mr. and Mrs. Black, it's a pleasure." Malfoy nudged past Sirius and extended his hand to Orion.

His father reaches past Regulus and takes Malfoy's hand. "Mr. Malfoy. I hear you're the top of your class."

"Yes, sir, I am." Malfoy threw a narrowed side-eye at Sirius. "I'm doing well, all things considered."

All things considered.

In a move that could otherwise be considered normal, Malfoy withdrew his hand and swished his hair back, exposing the long, pale scar down the left side of his face.

Sirius knew what Malfoy was doing. That scar, despite any arrangement Sirius and Malfoy may have made in private, was leverage against the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. An unforgivable disgrace, an unplayable debt his father would demand from Sirius, and, Merlin, Malfoy knew it. It didn't matter that Sirius had settled the debt with Malfoy already; Sirius would still be made to pay for the disgrace against his family and Malfoy would never let Orion Black forget it.

Malfoy tilted his head, let the light catch on the pale scar, and locked his gaze with Orion, the message clear: Look what your traitor of an heir did to me.

Sirius tried to will himself invisible.

Regulus let out an audible gasp, then a small whimper, as Walburga dug her fingers into his shoulders.

"Right," his father said, narrowing his eyes. "I can assure you, Mr. Malfoy, that the situation will be dealt with."

Even now, Orion Black apologises for nothing, least of all, for the deeds of his wayward son.

"I have no doubts." Lucius Malfoy looked so fucking proud of himself and, if Sirius wasn't on the verge of at least three different panic attacks, he'd be thinking up ways to punch Malfoy in his stupid face and get away with it. "I shall see you both at Christmas. Regulus, it was good to see you as well."

Something dangerous flared to life inside Sirius at the thought of Malfoy trying to befriend his younger brother, but whatever it was, it was quickly quelled by what he was sure was to be the first of many panic attacks.

His mother's eyes very nearly drilled a hole in Sirius's skull.

Nothing more was said, as Malfoy and Narcissa drifted away to find their own parents.

Walburga jerked her chin, and Sirius followed blindly, like a half-starved dog.

Regulus walked in front of their mother, but kept shooting these looks at Sirius, and Merlin, it was a language they'd spoken for so long, in between so many moments like this, both of them afraid, both of them stuck, and Sirius could hear every single word Regulus meant to say to him in their private, unspoken language.

I missed you.

Are you okay?

And the last one, a desperate, horrified look that Sirius prayed his parents couldn't decode.

Run, Sirius.

But despite it all, Sirius was Gryffindor. He'd sooner cut off his own arm than leave his brother behind.

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

Number Twelve Grimmauld Place looked like it had just been pulled out of a madman's nightmares.

In reality, it was merely the stage for every single one of Sirius's nightmares.

It manifested suddenly and all at once, morphing into existence between Numbers Eleven and Thirteen, large and imposing and every bit the haunted house in appearance as it was in reality.

Sirius followed his mother and father up the front steps and through the door, Regulus close behind him. Sirius's breaths felt shallow and ineffective against the invisible and mostly-metaphorical noose around his neck. He clenched his fists, digging his nails into the palms of his hands, hard enough to almost draw blood, but not quite.

Merlin, he couldn't give them the satisfaction of breaking down right now.

Sirius squared his jaw and forced his lungs to inflate normally.

His father hung his cloak on the claw-footed coat rack just inside the entryway, then stalked off to his office without another word. There was no way his father's silence could be taken as anything but a slow-moving storm front: the chaos and destruction was still a ways off, but its trajectory was set and the whirlwinds and thunder lurked ominously on the horizon.

Walburga slowly spun on her heels to face her two sons, her high cheekbones and silver eyes framed by the house-elf skulls lining the wall behind her. She looked every bit worthy of her role as Queen of the Damned.

She peeled her black silk gloves from her hands one at a time, then folded them neatly before tucking them into the pocket of her robes.

She held out a bony, perfectly manicured hand, a wickedly horrible smile spreading across her face.

"Sirius. Your wand," she said. She crooked one of her fingers.

Sirius gulped. Next to him, he felt more than saw Regulus tense up.

So. This was how it was going to be.

She knew very well that he was perfectly capable of magic even without his wand. It was a power move, plain and simple, more of a symbolic reassertion of the choke hold his mother already had around his neck. It was meant to break him, to toy with him, to take every last hope of freedom he thought he'd be able to maintain.

His broken, beautiful, beloved wand.

Helpless to do anything else, Sirius reached into the pocket of his robes and placed his wand in the palm of his mother's hand.

His mother's eyes gleamed as she turned to leave, but then she paused, seemed to weigh his wand in her hand, then glanced back down at Sirius.

A gurgling cackle that would've made his mad, incest-bred ancestors proud bubbled in her throat and burst forth between them. Instinctively, Sirius flinched back, making sure Regulus was behind him.

"Why, Sirius," his mother crowed between nauseating shrieks. "You've killed your wand, haven't you?"

Shame burned through him, eating away at every last piece of his soul. Sirius ducked his head, lest his mother see the tears in his eyes.

Walburga tested the wand, twirled it around in her hand, letting loose the occasional derogatory spat of maddened laughter.

"There's hardly anything magic left to be channeled." She turned her taunting gaze to Sirius. "Was it the Cruciatus?"

His silence seemed to be answer enough.

"I tried to tell that old fool," she taunted. "A thing like you was never meant to wield a unicorn hair wand. Perhaps this—" She pointed Sirius's wand at him, forced his chin up to meet her gaze. "—this will serve as a reminder of what you're supposed to be: ruthless, uncompromising. Worthy of your name. Unforgivable."

Unforgivable.

Sirius squeezed his eyes shut and prayed that the darkness inside him would somehow swallow him whole.

"Dinner is at seven. You will stay in your room until then," his mother said, but her words hardly registered.

She spun on her heels, her dress flaring around her as she did, in a dramatic swirl of black lace and fine, emerald fabric. His wand twirled between her fingers as she laughed to herself, heels clicking on the floor as she disappeared down the hallway.

The portraits of his ancestors echoed her mania in a chorus of mad, hysterical laughter that would haunt in Sirius for years.

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

Two minutes before seven o'clock, Kreacher apparated into his room.

Sirius hadn't even noticed the hours pass by. He'd been... numb.

"Master Sirius must report to the dining room. Kreacher will escort him," the house-elf grumbled.

When Sirius didn't even attempt to move from where he was laying on the bed, Kreacher Apparated over and yanked on Sirius's sleeve. Sirius tumbled to the floor, suddenly jolted back to reality and more than a little bruised for it. House-elves were surprisingly strong.

With a glower on his face that shockingly resembled his mother's, Kreacher reached down and grabbed Sirius by the ear, tugging at it until Sirius stood on his own. Kreacher's tiny hand clamped around Sirius's wrist. It didn't particularly hurt—house-elves were immune to the blood curse of his tattoo, a fact for which Sirius was eternally grateful, given the number of times Kreacher was in charge of his punishments growing up—but Sirius pulled away from his grip all the same. He hated Kreacher, hated everything that the house-elf represented.

Most of all, he hated that look in Kreacher's eyes: that mad, ravenous look that said he knew it was only a matter of time before Walburga handed him a switch and ordered Kreacher to punish her eldest son.

"I can walk, you fucking cretin," Sirius growled.

Kreacher didn't say Not for long, but it was written in every goddamned crevice of his expression.

Sirius shoved past the house-elf and down the stairs to the dining room, dread echoing in his every step, but somehow he managed to keep his head held high.

His parents and brother were already seated at the long, ancient, mahogany table, an ornate, savoury smelling feast laid out before them. Without looking at any of them, Sirius took his place at the narrow part of the table, directly across from Regulus. Neither of his parents acknowledged him, but after the moments of silence dragged on, Regulus finally looked up and met his eye.

It was... an apology.

Sirius's breath caught in his throat, but he forced himself to keep his face neutral.

Kreacher apparated in, bearing his mother's silver china plates. A second later, his father's house-elf—an ancient, decrepit little beast called Crawley—popped in carrying a beef roast. Crawley produced a carving knife and sliced a piece off, then handed the plate back to Kreacher, who then piled it high with potatoes and vegetables before placing the plate in front of Walburga. The house-elves loaded another plate, then another, placing them before his father and Regulus in turn.

Then, they apparated away, taking the rest of the roast with them.

Sirius grit his teeth together, but didn't dare say anything about his lack of a plate. They'd done this before. Often, in fact. It was one of his mother's favourite punishments: make him sit at the dinner table with absolutely nothing while she and Orion enjoyed a feast fit for kings. It was meant to humiliate him, and it did. Every damn time.

"How's the legislation coming along?" Walburga asked casually, before taking a long, elegant sip of her dark red wine.

Sirius felt himself tense. Dinner at Grimmauld Place was usually a solemn affair, unless there were guests. The most conversation that ever seemed to pass between the four of them was a perfunctory Sirius, remember your manners or Where's that damned elf with the wine?

His mother's question and his father's looming answer... this was meant for Sirius to hear.

The thought nauseated him.

Orion chewed his roast, then put down his knife. "It's certainly progressing. Abraxas Malfoy and the Hogwarts Education Board signed off on the wording of the referendum earlier this morning. There's no way the Old Man will agree to the application of the law to current students—and according to Lestrange, the Old Man's made that a bit of a sticking point with his own backers and will probably get his way."

His mother frowned. "Unfortunate."

"Indeed," Orion said. "We needn't worry too much. He won't be able to stop the referendum itself. No matter what he might tell his... constituents, the Ancient Houses have been the financial backbone of Wizarding Britain since long before the Old Man climbed on his high horse and dared to call this foolish endeavour moral integrity."

As if a Black knows anything about moral integrity, Sirius thought, bitterly.

His mother seemed to sense that Sirius was holding back a rather biting retort, and her eyes narrowed on him. "And what of our... champion?"

Walburga took great care in selecting that particular word, and there was a gleam in her eyes that spoke of a horrible, fanatical future. Goose-pimples erupted across Sirius's skin. Whatever this was, it meant something beyond a vague means of torturing Sirius.

A wicked smile crept across Walburga's face—and, Merlin, Sirius knew that smile well. Walburga Black was the kind of person who enjoyed seeing others in pain, especially if she'd decided they were deserving of that pain, no matter how arbitrary their supposed crimes were. This smile was meant for inflicting torture, for relishing in screams of agony, for tearing flesh from bone.

And it was aimed at Sirius.

Vaguely, he wondered if the force of her gaze alone was enough to reduce him to rubble and ash.

She swirled her wine and brought her goblet to her lips. "What is Mr. Riddle's position on the proposed Dark Creature legislation?"

Dark Creatures?!

This—this—was her ammunition, somehow meant to render Sirius bloody and broken, but his mind was so fuzzy with the chaos and confusion and ominous sense that war had just been declared and shots had just been fired, but Sirius had no real sense of where the bullets had punctured his flesh.

Sirius sat up a bit straighter. His eyes flicked between his parents, trying to discern the meaning of all of this and, more importantly, how he was somehow caught in the middle of all of it.

Across from him, Regulus choked on something, then coughed as silently as he could manage, thanks to years of etiquette training. Their parents ignored him, but Sirius caught Regulus's eye before his brother resumed staring at his plate and there it was.

Regulus knew something.

"Mr. Riddle supports the bill, of course," Orion continued, either oblivious or deliberately ignoring Sirius's attempts to get Regulus to look at him again. "He has idealistic notions that if this bill passes, it'll be the tipping point in the effort to turn the Dark Creatures against the Old Man's endless promises of reform and equality."

His mother scoffed at the very thought, and Sirius knew why. Dark Creatures were beneath even Muggles, in Walburga's eyes. A disgusting perversion of powerful, ancient magic not even innate to their very being, the vile creatures, he'd heard her say time and again.

"After they've... turned against the Old Man, does Mr. Riddle expect the Ancient Houses to align themselves with these beasts?" Walburga asked, her voice stone-cold.

"No, of course not." Orion raised his goblet to his lips and tilted his head in brief acknowledgment. "Though, Mr. Riddle has mentioned, on occasion, that these beasts would make excellent cannon fodder."

Canon fodder.

And there it was: the drums of war.

A war to what end or against whom, Sirius didn't know, but he could hazard a guess. The political agenda of the Blacks was always the same: Toujours Pur, and damned be anyone else.

His empty stomach twisted itself into about a thousand knots. He'd be expected to fight, of course, to raise the banner for the Blacks and the Ancient Houses and probably lead the fucking charge. It was the burden of his title, and fuck everything, because Sirius didn't want it.

This war, Mr. Riddle, the Wizengamot, all of it. Sirius would rather fall on his own sword than be a part of this.

Then, his eyes drifted across the table again, to Regulus, and Merlin, if that wasn't a knife to the heart.

He was allowed to leave. His mother had told him that a hundred thousand times, trying to bait him into it. Into abdicating his title and forfeiting his inheritance. Sirius knew he could walk away right now, with only a few curses to show for it. He could go find Andromeda and they could run as far from the Blacks as they possibly could. She'd marry Tonks, he'd be a proper Gryffindor, and maybe he'd carve out his very own fairytale life to match James Potter's.

But the Warden would never let him take Regulus. That was the price, and Sirius knew it. If he left, Regulus would be forced to stay. Regulus would be the heir, forged in the fire of their malice and hatred until he was their perfect weapon in this war they'd invented.

They'd carve him up, send him into battle until there was nothing left of Sirius's little brother.

This was the choice his mother was giving him. This was the silver bullet lodged in his chest.

Walburga's silver eyes gleamed with a conspiratorial malice as took another careful bite of her roast. She was in his head, reading his mind, watching him figure out that he had absolutely no exit strategy, no other choice but to take up his title and fulfil his role.

This was his punishment.

This was inevitable.

He should have been expecting this the moment he learned he'd have to return to Grimmauld Place.

"Eat your asparagus, Regulus," his mother snapped, but she wasn't looking at Regulus at all. Silver eyes leered at Sirius's empty plate, at the horrifying truth written all over his face, at the echo from the bullets that pierced whatever armour he'd found. "I'm told that not everyone has the privilege of a healthy meal."

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

The ache in his stomach and the suffocating feeling of impending doom followed Sirius well into the night, long after Walburga had spelled the lock shut on the door to his room. Not that it'd do much, really. All things considered, Sirius was still the unquestioned master of locking charms in Grimmauld Place.

It was the unspoken, overtly threatening stay put from the Warden that kept him confined to his room. War had already been declared and the terms of his surrender written in stone. He couldn't bring himself to push the limits of what little sanity and patience his mother had left.

He'd be a dead man.

And Regulus...

He wasn't going to think about that.

Sirius lay on his bed, flat on his back, his eyes on a focusing on a chandelier that he could hardly make out in the dark. He was in a ratty T-shirt he'd stolen from James, having ripped off his dinner robes and button-up shirt the second he'd been secluded in his room for the night. He'd thrown them somewhere on the floor, just desperate to pull away the constricting, fine fabric from his neck as if he'd be able to pull the noose free along with the clothes.

At a quarter to midnight, the loose floorboard outside his door gave an aborted, yet purposeful creak.

Sirius sat up ramrod straight in his bed. There was only one thing that could be. Kreacher never came up to Sirius's room without direct instructions from his mother and his parents were more than confident in their veiled (and not-so-veiled) threats of bodily harm that they would never bother to actually check on him.

Still, Sirius sent up a silent prayer that he was wrong.

Regulus couldn't be here.

Not now. It wasn't safe.

Apparently, in the time he'd been at Hogwarts, Regulus had become the master of wandless—fucking wandless!—locking charms at Grimmauld Place. The latch on his door gave a valiant shudder and Sirius almost felt the magic dissolve.

Regulus poked his head around the massive door. Two glimmers of dull light reflected against black, black eyes searched for Sirius in the dark, and Merlin, Sirius was weak and fucking selfish, because he wasn't brave enough to send Regulus away.

He'd missed him so fucking much.

Regulus had lived in this house long enough to know the punishments for going behind locked doors—let alone the greater punishment of fraternising with the disgraced Gryffindor heir—and Sirius tried to convince himself that it'd be okay.

He swore to himself that if it came to it, he't take Regulus's punishment. No questions asked.

Regulus's feet were silent against the carpet, deftly navigating around every creaky floorboard in the room. They'd spent hours—years, even—meticulously mapping out the entire span of floor between Sirius's bed and Regulus's, in the room across the hall, for instances such as these.

Sirius could almost feel Regulus getting closer, with all the weight of the past few months sparking in the air between them. When Regulus was a few feet from Sirius's bed, Regulus's foot caught on Sirius's discarded dinner robes. Sirius heard the breath leave his brother's lungs as Regulus plummeted towards the floor.

His heart was in his throat, but goddamnit, Sirius was ready.

He flicked his wrist and threw a wandless Silencio at Regulus, just as his knees made contact with the floor.

It didn't make a sound.

Sirius and Regulus remained frozen in place, each of them holding their breath for nearly a full minute before Regulus dared to move.

Sirius barely had enough time to extend the silencing charm over his bed before Regulus launched himself at him and Sirius suddenly had his arms full of his sobbing little brother. And Merlin, Sirius clung to him, almost hard enough to bruise.

This wasn't like touching Peter or Malfoy or Narcissa or fucking anyone else.

Because touching Regulus—holding him and shielding him from the nightmare closing in around the both of them—that was Sirius Black's sacred mission, and one he accepted with pride.

It could never hurt to touch Regulus, and when Sirius held him like this, not even the vague ache from the soul-crushing nothing-pain could reach him.

Regulus was too much of something to ever be mistaken for nothing.

And, Merlin, tonight that something had the desperate, miraculous magic of a healing spell over a near-fatal wound.

"Hey, Reg," Sirius breathed into Regulus's hair. His fingers dug into Regulus's pyjamas, clutching at the only good thing left in this fucking house, as if his brother might be suddenly torn from his arms.

Oh, how his mother would love that. It'd certainly add to his torment.

But, relatively speaking, they were safe here, under the protection of Sirius's silencing charm and the cover of night around them. And, even then, if anyone or anything tried to pry Regulus from his arms, Sirius would stop at nothing to keep his brother close.

He'd find the nearest wand and throw an Unforgivable.

What the hell did it matter? He'd done it before.

Regulus sniffed, sobbed a little more, then wiped his nose against his sleeves. He sat up enough so that he could look Sirius in the eye. He was still seated mostly in Sirius's lap. It wasn't exactly comfortable, now that they were almost the same size—Sirius being relatively short for his age and Regulus having seemingly come out of rather recent growth spurt—but Sirius wasn't about to shove Regulus away.

"I fucking missed you," Regulus blurted out.

Sirius barked a laugh, surprised, more than anything, by the outburst. It was the first thing his brother had said directly to him in months.

"Where the fuck did you learn to swear like that?" Sirius asked.

"Mrs. Blanche Withers," Regulus deadpanned, and honestly, Sirius couldn't tell if he was joking. Given the general temperament of the tutors his mother tended to hire, it wouldn't exactly surprise him.

Regulus nudged Sirius in the ribs and scooted over so that he was stretched out next to Sirius, rather than on top of him. Regulus pressed close, shoulder to hip, seemingly just as unwilling to give up the physical contact as Sirius. Vaguely, Sirius found himself wondering if anyone had actually touched Regulus—outside of a punishment or his mother's strategically threatening iron grip—since Sirius went to Hogwarts.

At least Sirius had had Remus and James and Lily and the duvet stolen from one of the beds in the boys' dormitory. He'd had the Prewetts—who were no strangers to affectionate displays of camaraderie, especially after a successful prank—and students pressed up against him in the halls, and Salazar's fucking balls, nearly every second of it hurt, so much so that there had been times when Sirius thought he'd lose is fucking mind from the pain of it all and—

And then, Remus had hugged him.

Remus Lupin. Remus Lupin, and every scarred, brilliantly beautiful, fucking devious inch of him. Remus Lupin, who burned brighter than every damned star in the night sky, who gave him books and had believed that Sirius was made for Gryffindor when no one else in the fucking universe could see past his name and all the horrible things it represented.

Remus Lupin: half-blood, somehow cursed to be, unequivocally, the source and summit of the worst pain that Sirius Black had ever felt.

That Remus Lupin had hugged him, knowing full well what Sirius felt, knowing that the world was crashing down around them.

Sirius had a hunch that Remus would try to apologise to Sirius once he got back to Hogwarts.

(If he got back to Hogwarts.)

Sirius wouldn't let him.

It scared him sometimes, how much he preferred the unimaginable pain to the overwhelming nothing inside him.

Next to him, Regulus made a small noise and wiggled a little, fishing for something in his pocket.

"I almost forgot," Regulus said. "I brought this for you."

Regulus pushed something into the palm of Sirius's hand. Sirius's eyes were having a difficult time focusing in the dark, but he knew what it was from the smell and that horrible, nasty way his stomach clenched.

The half-loaf of French bread was wrapped in a linen cloth. This close, Sirius could smell the expensive cheese spread between the two halves.

If Sirius was a weaker person, he'd have ripped into the bread and devoured it in three seconds flat, hungry as he was.

But Walburga would not win that easily.

She'd still get her pound of flesh, Sirius well knew, but he certainly wasn't about to give her an excuse to take the first swing right now.

He still had two weeks here, and his mother already had a taste of war. She'd be unstoppable, if he surrendered now.

"Reg," Sirius drawled, pushing the bread and cheese back into his brother's hands. "You know I can't take this."

Regulus did know. Sirius knew he did. He'd more than likely heard Walburga's ranting and raving about her plans to punish Sirius for months at this point. Regulus knew Walburga's answer to disobedience.

It was almost completely dark—with almost no moon to offer even a semblance of light from the open window—but Sirius saw the wave of desperation and heartbreak that washed over Regulus's face.

Regulus bit his lip, frowning in the dark, and Merlin, for a moment, he looked so much like their father that Sirius very nearly swallowed his tongue.

"You're hungry," Regulus said, stubbornly. "You need to eat. You have no idea what's—"

Regulus swallowed whatever he'd been about to say, but Sirius heart the words anyway, in the silence that lingered between them.

Regulus did know, then, all the horrible things the Warden had planned for Sirius.

"Reg," Sirius breathed, his voice cracking. "She'll come for you, too, if she knows you tried to help."

Regulus shook his head and clutched at Sirius's wrist. "No. No, Siri, she won't know it was from me. I told Kreacher I was hungry and had him bring it up to my—"

Sirius let out a broken laugh, and, for a moment, the madness of his ancestors bled into his voice. "You trust Kreacher?!"

"Of course," Regulus said, like it was fucking abhorrent to think otherwise.

"He's Walburga's elf, Reg."

"So?"

"He hates me!"

"Well, he loves me!"

At this, Sirius let out a long-suffering sigh. Regulus always did have a soft spot for that monster of a house-elf.

"You can't trust him. Not while I'm here." Sirius paused to once more press the linen-wrapped loaf of bread into Regulus's hand. "Call him in here to take this back."

"But if Mother knows I'm in here—"

"It'll be worse if she knows you tried to bring me food," Sirius replied, soberly. Even if their mother tried to punish Regulus for being in Sirius's room, Sirius swore to himself that he'd step in and take the blame. Sirius would say that he sought Regulus out, more or less bullied Regulus into his room and bed, and Merlin, Walburga would believe it.

Then, the curses would start.

An expression crossed over Regulus's face as he figured out Sirius's contingency plan. Sirius watched as Regulus weighed the options: either leave now, and potentially not speak to Sirius again for another six months, or stay in Sirius's bed, risk life and limb in getting caught, then allow Sirius to take on whatever brutality Walburga would come up with.

Sirius made the choice for him. Anything, really, to remove the guilt from Regulus.

None of this was Regulus's fault.

"It'll be fine, Reg. I promise." It probably wouldn't be fine, but Sirius didn't fucking care. "Please stay. Please?"

Eyes wet and wide with fear, Regulus nodded.

"Kreacher!" Regulus hissed in the dark, though the command was still so sharp and sudden enough that Sirius lurched back a little.

A second later, the wretched house-elf apparated in. Sirius internally cringed at the loud pop it made, but the creaky floorboards outside his room that indicated movement in the hallway remained miraculously silent.

From his vantage point on the floor at the end of Sirius's bed, Kreacher let out a low growl as his eyes fell on the linen-wrapped bread still suspended in limbo between Sirius and Regulus.

"Master Sirius has stolen Master Regulus's bread. Bread that Kreacher made special for Master Regulus." The sneer deepened across Kreacher's face, the dull light catching on every pale crevice of his face. "Nasty Gryffindor steals from my Master, when nasty Gryffindor was ordered to bed without dinner. My Mistress will not be pleased."

Merlin, how Sirius hated this... creature. His mother's blunt little instrument, his torturer and quite possibly executioner, if tonight was any indication on how Sirius's luck would hold up.

Sirius wasn't going down without a fight. Not against the fucking house-elf.

He called his magic to his fingertips, readying a nasty hex, but then Regulus grabbed his wrist.

"Kreacher," Regulus said, a note of pleading in his voice. "The bread was for me, but I'm not as hungry as I thought I was. Sirius didn't have any of it. You can check."

Regulus leaned forward and offered the bread to Kreacher. The house-elf didn't even look at it, his beady eyes instead narrowing on Sirius.

"My Master is not supposed to be seeing the nasty Gryffindor." A horribly cruel smile crept across Kreacher's face. It made him look every bit like the dead-eyed house-elf skulls that lined the entryway of Grimmauld Place. "Mistress says he is a blood traitor. Mistress says Kreacher gets to punish the blood traitor. Master Regulus would not be wanting to share in that—"

Sirius snapped, "I dragged him in here, you little shit," at the same time Regulus said, "Kreacher, please don't tell Mother!"

Kreacher's eyes darted between the Black brothers, just as Sirius swore under his breath. He was supposed to take the blame, goddamnit. Sirius wasn't about to bargain with Kreacher for Regulus's safety.

But Regulus merely tightened his grip on Sirius's arm.

"Kreacher will not lie to his Mistress," the house-elf grit out.

"It's not lying," Regulus said, quickly. "It's just... omission."

Sirius scoffed. To Walburga Black, it was the same thing.

"Mistress will not be pleased," Kreacher growled.

"Please, Kreacher," Regulus whispered, and Merlin, that almost sounded like a prayer passing through his brother's lips. Sirius's gut clenched. Regulus was not meant to be the one bargaining for Sirius's safety. That wasn't how this worked, but if Sirius spoke up now, they were both fucked.

"Do it for me?" Regulus continued. "You can keep the bread. See?"

Regulus pulled the linen away and tossed the scrap of cloth in Sirius's lap—lest it accidentally be mistaken for an article of clothing—and offered the bread to Kreacher.

A long silence stretched between them, and Sirius tried to mentally prepare himself for surrender and his mother's curses.

Finally—finally—Kreacher took the bread. The rickety old elf clutched the loaf close to his chest and took a large, greedy bite with pointed teeth.

Despite Sirius's raging hatred towards the elf, Sirius couldn't help but wonder how long it had been since Walburga allowed Kreacher to eat.

"Kreacher thanks Master Regulus," Kreacher managed, around the crumbs tumbling from his mouth. "Mistress will not hear of this."

"Thank you, Kreacher."

Regulus let out a long breath as Kreacher disapparated once more, and Sirius was in genuine awe of the affection lurking behind his brother's words.

Now that they were alone and relatively safe, the silence was enormous, weighted down by the months spent apart and all that had changed.

Sirius was Gryffindor.

Sirius was a blood traitor.

There was a war brewing around them, and the Black brothers were lost somewhere in the eye of the storm.

"Why didn't you write?" Regulus's broken voice cut through the silence, and it was a dagger straight to Sirius's already-shattered heart.

Because of-fucking-course.

Not only had his mother burned Sirius's letters, but she'd made sure that Regulus never knew that Sirius had sent them in the first place.

"She burned them, Reg," Sirius breathed. "I wrote you loads of things. After the Sorting, about the castle. About that absolute idiot, James Potter. Merlin, you'd love him. We made a flag, stuck it on top of Gryffindor tower, and..." He trailed off at Regulus's expression: a careful mix of pain buried directly under stoney exterior, a look Regulus had somehow stolen directly from their father. "Never mind. I even had 'Dromeda try to sneak a letter through, but I think Walburga burned those too."

Sirius felt more than saw the tension break in Regulus. It all came flooding open at once, sudden emotion pouring out with hurricane-force winds. Regulus threw himself at Sirius, and for half a moment, Sirius thought his brother was going to punch him, but instead, skinny arms wrapped around Sirius's middle as Regulus once again sobbed into Sirius's neck.

"I thought... I thought you didn't care about me anymore. You left, Siri, and I thought—"

Where Sirius had expected the full force of his brother's anguished abandonment and deliberate accusation—anger and furious outbursts were modus operandi in the Black household—Regulus merely let out a small whine and the strangled sound of a kicked puppy.

"Don't ever think that," Sirius hissed, fierce enough that he felt Regulus flinch against him. Sirius lowered his voice. "I'm never going to leave you here alone, okay? I fucking promise. I might be away for a while at Hogwarts, but you come first. Always. Got it?"

Sirius didn't know if he was brave enough to keep that promise, but he made it anyway.

To Sirius's dismay, Regulus shook his head vigorously, the fringe of his hair coming loose and scraping against the soft skin on Sirius's neck.

"No. You don't understand," Regulus said. "She... She called you a blood traitor. She said you attacked Malfoy. She... Fuck, you're in bloody Gryffindor, Sirius!"

Sirius pulled away slightly, just enough to see his brother's face. At the look in Regulus's eyes, Sirius was violently thrown back to the last time the two of them were huddled close together on this bed.

The night Auclair died, Sirius had told Regulus that being called a blood traitor, even if it wasn't strictly true, was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He understood, then, what Regulus meant: His mother would treat his grievances as a challenge, as an excuse to torment him until he broke. She didn't want him as her heir; he was a stain against the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black and he was a Gryffindor. She was merely waiting for the opportunity to burn him from the tapestry, officially brand him as a blood traitor to House Black, and let the cursed tattoo continue to torment Sirius long after she'd croaked her last breath.

He'd never be able to touch Regulus again—or any pureblood, for that matter—if his mother burned him off the tapestry. The intricate, ancient magic laced in the ink of his tattoo would forever turn against him.

He wouldn't be able to touch anyone.

This was the choice his mother was offering: submit, or lose absolutely everything.

Merlin, he should have seen it coming from the moment the Sorting Hat started whispering notes of rebellion in his ear.

"Why'd you have to be sorted into Gryffindor?" Regulus asked, as if that were the true source of all of Sirius's problems, and not his mother's generalised hatred of her eldest son for no other reason than because he was fucking born. "You were supposed to be in Slytherin. It'd all be fine if you were in Slytherin."

Sirius had to laugh at the absolute absurdity of that thought. "No, it wouldn't."

Regulus pouted. "Why not?"

Because, Black heir or no, Sirius would've been Lucius Malfoy's bitch, same as Snivellus.

Because the cruelty of the Carrows would not only have been expected of Sirius, but probably engineered and orchestrated by him.

Because, if Sirius was put in Slytherin, every assumption McGonagall had ever made about him would be true.

Because if Sirius was Slytherin, he'd never have known the sheer joy of being friends with James Potter, or the uncompromising force of nature that was Lily Josephine Evans, King of fucking Gryffindor. Or the incomprehensible beauty in the brilliant amber eyes and scarred face of Remus Lupin, who, above anyone Sirius had ever met, knew the harrowing depths of pain, but whose soul still had room for unflinching kindness.

If Sirius had been Slytherin, he would have been cruel and cowardly. He'd have surrendered to the pureblood fanaticisms of his parents without question.

He'd have become the same monster that he feared in his mother.

Sirius let out a long sigh and made sure Regulus was looking at him. "I asked the Sorting Hat for Gryffindor, Regulus. It gave me a choice."

Regulus opened and closed his mouth in utter disbelief. "You... You what?!"

Sirius wasn't going to repeat it. He wasn't that brave.

His brother had tears in his eyes. "Why would you do that, Sirius?"

"I... I wanted to be brave. I'm not, but... I think I want to be." It was the simplest and most complicated answer that Sirius could give. "I can't be like them, Reg. I'm not like them. You have no idea how wrong they are."

"They're our family, Sirius," Regulus snapped.

Sirius tugged down the collar of his shirt, just enough so that his tattoo was showing. Even if Regulus couldn't see it in the dark, they both knew it was there and what it meant.

"They fucking branded us, Reg," Sirius hissed. "They staked a claim on our lives and our blood, nothing more. They aren't fucking family."

Regulus pushed himself away from Sirius so quickly that he nearly tumbled off the bed. "I'm nothing?"

Fuck.

"No. That's not what I meant."

You're everything.

Regulus's expression softened but he didn't make any move to shift closer to Sirius.

"It was my choice, Reg," Sirius whispered. "I knew what would happen."

Sirius felt the distance between them like a gaping, open wound from a curse he should have seen coming.

How was he supposed to explain the choice the Sorting Hat had given him?

Is this truly something you want, to be made into a pariah by your family, to be tormented by your peers, to be judged by your name, until you prove the true intentions of your heart by your actions?

And then, even more inexplicable: Lionheart.

Sirius knew then and there that the Sorting Hat would never—could never—place Regulus Arcturus Black anywhere other than Slytherin.

His brother would not be offered a choice. Part of him—the very, very Black part of him—wanted to rage against the idea that Regulus had no control over his own fate, but a voice that sounded suspiciously like Remus Lupin told Sirius that that wasn't it at all.

Regulus Black belonged in Slytherin the same as Sirius belonged in Gryffindor. Not because Regulus was a coward like Snape or cruel like the Carrows, or any of the other reasons Sirius himself could never be Slytherin. Slytherin would make a monster out of Sirius Black.

For Regulus, it just fit.

His brother was as cunning and clever as Sirius, but Regulus was reserved, where as Sirius tended towards impulsivity. Regulus revered structure, order, and the discipline of the pure-blood culture, and he was quick witted enough to not get on anyone's bad side—a skill that Sirius sorely lacked. Regulus was every bit pristine and practical as Sirius was rough around the edges.

And, more than anything else, Regulus Black was fiercely loyal to those whom he loved, even to the point of risking his own physical well being.

That wasn't only a Gryffindor trait.

Sirius hadn't known the depths of Regulus's loyalty to him until tonight, really. Sure, he knew objectively that Regulus loved him and that he himself would do absolutely-fucking-anything for Regulus, no questions asked, but this...

Regulus was choosing a side in the only way a Slytherins knew how: consequences be damned. Even if Regulus never saw punishment. Even if tomorrow morning, Regulus still towed the company line.

Tonight, he'd chosen Sirius.

If their positions were reversed, and Regulus was faced with potential starvation as a means to coerce him into playing a rather undesirable role in a coming war, Sirius would have stormed the fucking castle. He wouldn't've planned, he wouldn't've taken a second to fucking think. He'd have blown the door from its hinges, grabbed his brother, and cursed any and everyone who dared stand between the two of them and their escape.

Instead, Regulus had done the Slytherin thing. He'd had a plan, he'd lied to the appropriate parties, then he'd found a way to sneak into Sirius's room and offered him the bread.

It wasn't an impulsive prison break, or even a permanent solution to the current problem. Even if Sirius had taken the bread, he'd still be hungry come tomorrow, and it wasn't like Walburga wasn't going to let up in her efforts after one night.

The bread was merely an offer of reprieve, though one Sirius could never accept on good conscience. Sirius would damn himself to hell ten times over before he ever let his mother catch wind of any of this.

That was the difference between them: Sirius would throw himself into the flames, when Regulus would find a way to tame them.

Now, Regulus stood, with cautious and deliberate movements as he slipped past the boundary of Sirius's silencing charm. Sirius allowed the magic around them to dissolve reluctantly, but he knew there was no way Regulus could spend the night here.

From the expression on his face, Regulus looked like someone had violently torn his heart in half.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this, Siri," Regulus whispered, and maybe he was right. Maybe it wasn't.

Maybe, they were not supposed to be Gryffindor and Slytherin, blood traitor and loyal second son. Of fucking course this all felt wrong to Sirius, but wrong in the sense that Sirius always imagined sharing a dorm and planning mischief at Hogwarts with Regulus, long before he'd ever met the Marauders.

"I know, Reg," Sirius said, but he didn't have it in him to apologise to his brother for any of it.

Sirius Black had been handed a life and a destiny he would never want the moment he came screaming into this world. Whatever higher power supposedly watched over them had tried, just as their mother had, to forge and hone Sirius into a deadly weapon worthy of his name and title.

Changing his own fate was never a possibility that Sirius even allowed himself to consider. Not even once, growing up in Grimmauld Place, or even when listening to that parrot in Diagon Alley squawk out prophecies about killing God. It hadn't really been until he was confronted with the unbridled conviction etched into every scarred inch of Remus Lupin's face that Sirius let himself believe that he might one day be brave enough to take his life into his own hands.

Then, Sirius had made a choice. A real one, for the first time in his goddamned life.

Now, Sirius absently wondered if a single choice alone was enough to kill God.

Sirius met his brother's eyes in the dark, then reached out to grab his hand.

"I missed you, too, you know. More than you'll ever fucking know," Sirius said, and meant every word.

Regulus just frowned at him. "You had your friends. Mother said that you and James Potter—"

"They aren't you, Reg," Sirius snapped, recoiling at the very thought that the valiant prince, James-fucking-Potter, had somehow made it onto his mother's radar. But that was a problem for another day. "I know it's..." Too much, not enough, too late, never soon enough. "Ugh, Merlin, Regulus, please just tell me that you're okay."

Regulus held his gaze for a long moment, then seemed to decide that it was best to ignore Sirius's plea entirely.

"It's going to get bad, Sirius. You have no idea." Sirius had no clue if Regulus meant now, in the next two weeks, or possibly years into the future, but there were tears in his brother's eyes as he spoke. "I... I won't be able to do anything else. Whatever happens, you can't break, Sirius. Please don't let them break you."

And that was Slytherin, too, wasn't it? Regulus had to play the game, had to tow the line and be the perfect heir, even if he'd already sworn his allegiance to Sirius in every way that counted. Sirius would never fault him for it, either, because Regulus would bide his time until he saw the opportunity for the killing blow.

He knew Regulus wouldn't hesitate, as Sirius had with Auclair.

"I won't," Sirius breathed, and those two words felt as though they were imbued with more magic than the Unbreakable Vow he'd made with Malfoy.

There was so much lurking in the darkness between them, in every nook and cranny of this wretched house. There was so much that Sirius didn't know: plans and schemes with terrifying ends that Sirius had no doubt would cause insurmountable pain and destruction.

Regulus would be faced with the same choices as Sirius—and, as it happened, perhaps more difficult ones with far greater consequences—and Regulus would make his choices as a Slytherin: cunning and clever, devious and deadly from his place in the shadows, but loyal only to his own heart and those that he kept safe within its chambers.

Sirius could see it all, this horror-stricken future laid out in front of him as clearly as the map of stars outside his bedroom window. He didn't have the key, or even of firm grasp of which way was north—and, Merlin, Regulus was only eleven—but this kind of thing felt... ineffable.

Fate may be a cruel and capricious god, but it would be kind to Regulus Black. Sirius would be sure of it.

Regulus turned to leave, but Sirius kept his grip tight. He was still flying blind, a thousand and one questions swirled along the edges of his vision, and Merlin, maybe he just needed to be pointed in a random direction, even if he was still left wandering in the dark.

"Regulus?" Sirius's voice was hardly loud enough to be heard over the sounds of their breathing. "Who's Mr. Riddle?"

Something harrowing passed over Regulus's face, like a dark veil over the brilliant light of the full moon.

Then, Regulus tugged his hand free of Sirius's grasp and was gone without a word.

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

DECEMBER 23, 1971

Sirius supposed that for most people, at least in theory, time moved in something of a linear fashion, rather than all at once.

He was fairly certain that, objectively, days passed around him, but they passed like air through his fingers, slipping out of his grasp and entirely intangible. Sirius was merely a shade, anything that had once been corporeal about him completely consumed by hunger, loneliness, and pain. Every waking hour was filled with the shrill sounds of his mother's voice, forbidding him food at every damn meal and talking in vaguely threatening circles that made no sense to Sirius's addled mind—things about Dark Creatures and ancient magic and Mudbloods and honestly, the rights of the Ancient Houses should never fall victim to fallacies of progressivism, Orion and Mr. Riddle.

Always, it came back to Mr. Riddle.

Even when the sun set and Sirius listlessly made his way to his bedroom to be locked in for the night, his mother's voice followed him like a disembodied spirit into his nightmares. She'd curse him, call him a blood traitor—neither of which were particularly rare in the waking world—but then Sirius would watch her burn his own name from the family tapestry, over and over, just before he watched his own fingers crumble into dust and nothing.

On one of these nights, delirious from nightmares and hunger, Sirius found himself in the kitchens. He wasn't entirely sure how he'd gotten there, seeing how both time and reality seemed to have turned against him. He remembered waking from the nightmare, still feeling the claws of whatever dark beast had been chasing him rending the flesh on his chest, tearing past the tattoo until it tasted flesh. He remembered the heart-pounding moments after the nightmare, but not the decision to undo his mother's locking charm, or the descent down the stairs, or the his grand entrance to the kitchens that must have knocked something over, given the amount of broken china on the floor.

Idly, Sirius realised he'd stepped on a shattered piece of paisley teacup. His foot was bleeding, leaving red-streaked prints in his wake.

Sirius was beyond caring.

He tore open the cupboards, until he found—

Fresh bread.

Bread, that he'd so naively turned down when Regulus had offered it to him.

He couldn't remember why he'd turned it down. It'd seemed so important at the time.

Sirius was familiar with starvation, and he wasn't about to lose whatever calories he might manage to find by throwing up after eating too fast. Biting back every instinct that roared at him to devour the loaf of bread whole, Sirius broke of a little piece, popped it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. Again, and again, one minuscule piece at a time, until nearly half the loaf was gone.

Behind him, Kreacher let out a chortled laugh. "Blood traitors are not allowed dinner in my Mistress's house. The nasty Gryffindor steals from my Mistress."

Sirius spun around, rabid, clutching the bread to his chest. With his free hand, he called his magic to his fingertips, and in one graceless move, Sirius fired a stinging hex at Kreacher, immediately followed by a binding hex.

Too late, Sirius realised that his magic might be the only thing sustaining his body. Weakened as he was by hunger and nightmares, Sirius actually felt the magic drain from him. His vision swirled, then went dark, and the next thing he knew, he on his hands and knees, eyes zooming in and out of focus on his bloody hands and the blood-stained pieces of broken china around him.

"You really ought to have known better," Walburga Black said, conversationally. She was wearing a night dress and her hair was down, and she ran a finger over the scorch mark on the kitchen wall, apparently from where Sirius's hexes had missed Kreacher. "Or, perhaps, I should have known better. You never were suited for obedience, Sirius."

Sirius was having a difficult time deciding whether she was real, or merely a product of his broken mind.

His mother's silver eyes flared with an unholy fury that was becoming of nightmares, but Sirius had seen that look on Walburga's face far too often to rule out the possibility of reality. "I should have cut you from my womb the moment I felt you kick. And Salazar, how you screamed. I should have had the wet nurse suffocate you, claimed a tragic accident, and named your brother as my heir. You are unworthy of the magic in your veins, of the nobility of your blood."

Sirius tried to push himself to his feet, gritting his teeth together as the palms of his hands ground down into the fine glass from the china scattered across the floor. A small sound escaped his lips, entirely without his permission, but he managed to climb to his knees before—

"Stay down!" his mother roared, just before she drew her wand and fired off a Knockback Jinx.

Sirius went sliding back across the floor, broken glass lodging in his skin. He felt the blood trickling down his forehead, from a particularly deep gash by his hairline, the blood stinging his eyes. Every joint and muscle in his body ached from exhaustion, and it felt like wasn't an ounce of magic left in his bones.

Real. She was definitely real.

Sirius spat out a mouthful of blood. He'd apparently bitten his tongue.

"You will learn to obey me, Sirius, or I will find everything you love and burn it to the ground. There's a war coming, my son. Not even the Old Man will be able to protect your little Gryffindor friends forever. You will learn your place or you will die with them."

Think I'd rather die.

"You really are a Gryffindor." His mother sounded almost bemused, and Sirius was so taken aback that he didn't have time to worry that he'd said his intentions out loud. "Stupid. Arrogant. Unworthy. Had I not birthed you myself, I'd have called your legitimacy into question."

Walburga twirled her wand, a forlorn expression washing over her face. "Too late now, I suppose. The House of Black needs its eldest son, now more than ever. You'll have to do."

Despite everything, Sirius found himself laughing. It came out broken and bloody, and Sirius was half-convinced there was a piece of glass lodged in his throat, but he couldn't stop himself. "Why? Why the fuck do you need me?"

He glanced up at his mother and almost shrunk away from the intensity of the lascivious gleam in the pure silver of her eyes. He was looking into the future, but the future as spelled into creation by the cruel hand Walburga Black. Every second of it spilled out in front of him, and Merlin, his nightmares had nothing on this.

This was war and desolation, fire and brimstone, all of it already written out in detail, unchangeable and unrelenting.

"You will obey me, Sirius," Walburga droned, slow and steady, knowing full well what he'd seen, "or Regulus will take your place."

No.

No.

He could never abandon Regulus to that fate.

"Your choice, Sirius. Yes or no."

Sirius swallowed what was left of his broken pride, and it lodged in his throat right alongside the piece of shattered glass. "Yes, Mother."

Walburga tipped her chin up in triumph, a wicked smile creeping across her face.

She raised her wand. "Crucio."

Sirius curled in on himself, but the force of the curse followed him anyway, tearing through his defences, setting every nerve on fire and boiling him alive. He grit his teeth, but it did not stop the scream from wrenching itself free from his torn throat.

His mother did not react, merely watching him writhe in pain in a pile of broken glass until she finally let the curse drop.

Sirius panted, unable to catch his breath, his throat raw and hoarse, and so much blood that he could barely see straight. Summoning the last of his strength, Sirius raised his head and forced himself to look at Walburga.

Her long, black hair was sleek against her back, down, like it so rarely was, but not a hair out of place. Her high cheekbones and aristocratic features reeked of victory and loathing, all at once. Silver eyes—as silver as the moonlight that streamed through the window—glared down at him, as finally, she laughed.

She was beautiful, perhaps not in spite of but because of the cruelty etched into her every feature. She was a ravenous creature, locked away and starved for eons, waiting for the moment to reap destruction on the world of men.

I look like her, a crazy voice in his head whispered. Which, in retrospect, was an odd thing to think while she was pointing a wand at him whilst he was currently bleeding all over the shattered pieces of her super-fucking-expensive wedding china.

Walburga left him there, a broken shell of the brave Gryffindor he'd prayed he'd be able to become, laughing all the way down the hall and back up the stairs.

Eventually, Sirius picked himself up and dragged himself up the stairs. He had to stop on the landing to catch his breath because he was panicking, goddamnit. His magic was depleted, his body still shivered with aftershocks from the Cruciatus, there was glass in his throat, and his future had been written for him, entirely without his permission.

You will obey me, Sirius, or Regulus will take your place.

He wondered what it meant, swearing fealty to the House of Black.

He didn't think he wanted to know the answer.

Sirius collapsed in his bed, a thousand shallow cuts bleeding into his sheets. He didn't dare try a healing spell, not in the least because he didn't currently posses enough magic to pull one off without further complicating his injuries.

A healing spell would mean disobedience. His mother wanted to suffer.

If he healed his wounds, then Regulus would take his place. That was how this worked.

Sirius sobbed into his pillow and tried to will himself into his grave.

In the morning, Kreacher Apparated into his room bearing three potion vials. He drank them all down without even looking at the labels. One, he figured, was a healing potion, because as he drank the other two, he watched the skin on his knuckles knit itself back together. The second and third were harder to decipher, but he figured one was a nutrition potion—not food, by any means, but enough to keep him alive and cognisant for at least a few more days.

After a few minutes later, after Kreacher had popped out again, Sirius figured out what the third potion did. It started slowly, then came in a rush, a flood of sensation that was almost euphoric.

His magic had returned.

He muttered a Scourgify and the blood disappeared first from his sheets, then from his skin and pyjamas. He sat on his bed, feeling all at once better and worse than he had in days.

Sirius didn't think for a second that the potions meant that he was forgiven. The Cruciatus the night before had been for the bread he'd stolen. He still had one hell of a reckoning coming, and he knew it.

Still, something had changed. His mother had shown her cards.

The House of Black needed its heir.

If he were Slytherin, or even a braver Gryffindor, he would be able to use that as leverage. He'd be able to negotiate for even a modicum of control over his own fate.

But Regulus came first, always, and Walburga knew it.

And that was the end of it, wasn't it?

He'd give anything, tear himself down to nothing, destroy himself completely to make sure his little brother was never touched by the cruel hands of fate or the ravenous claws of their mother.

You really are a Gryffindor.

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

DECEMBER 25, 1971

Traditionally, Christmas at Grimmauld Place was a small, somber affair that usually involved Walburga and Orion at either ends of the long, ornate dining table, and Sirius and Regulus across from each other in the middle. Kreacher would cook something nice, Orion would present Walburga with an expensive gift, probably imported illegally from some far off country, and that would be it. Orion would retire to his study, Walburga to her rooms, and Sirius and Regulus would entertain themselves in the library.

Traditionally, Christmas at Grimmauld Place was like any other given evening on the calendar.

This year, however, Andromeda Black was to be engaged.

That, of course, was entirely Sirius's fault.

"It's not your fault," Andromeda hissed, but Sirius just glared at her.

It was only four in the afternoon, and already Grimmauld Place was far too crowded with far too many mostly-hated relatives for Sirius's comfort.

Not that Grimmauld Place could, by any definition, ever be considered comfortable.

Aunt Druella and Uncle Cygnus had been the first to arrive, accompanied by Bellatrix, Narcissa, and a very grumpy Andromeda. Bellatrix and Narcissa wore elegant green and crimson dresses befitting of the holiday. They were led into the parlour on the arms of Rodolphus Lestrange and Lucius Malfoy, respectively, before both Malfoy and Lestrange broke off to pay respects to Walburga, Orion, and finally, to Sirius, the heir to House Black.

Sirius took great, arcane pleasure in watching Malfoy bow to him, even if the feeling was short lived once he caught the gleam in Malfoy's eye. He knew what that meant. It wouldn't be long now. Malfoy would claim his revenge for the scar on his face.

Mostly, Sirius tried not to think about it.

Andromeda, for her part, wore black, befitting only of her name and her mood. When finally managed to break free from her own precursory greetings and salutations, she plopped down on the settee next to Sirius with an angry huff. Her long, curly hair—just as elegant and sleek as Bellatrix's was wild and unruly—pulled back, and Sirius caught a glimpse of dangling yellow-gold earrings.

Yellow and black.

Andromeda was wearing Hufflepuff colours—Ted's colours—in a sign of defiance so subtle that it could have only been designed by a Slytherin.

Sirius didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"I'm only going to say this one more time," Andromeda practically growled in his ear, and Sirius frowned as he felt everyone else's eyes on them. It wasn't unusual for him and Andromeda to be sequestered away at Black family gatherings, but he still felt the palpable waves of his mother's disapproval from across the room. "This is not your fault."

Across the room, Walburga chatted amicably with Lucius Malfoy. That certainly didn't bode well for him.

Sirius turned the force of his own glare back on Andromeda. "You helped me. Now we're here. It is most definitely my fault."

Andromeda rolled her eyes with all the dramatic flair innate to those bearing the Black name. "It was only a matter of time. I'm older than Narcissa, and she's been more or less unofficially betrothed to that pasty, little git over there for almost a year. For Christ's sake, she's still at Hogwarts! It was only a question of how long I could continue fielding my mother's attempts at setting me up with some rich, pure-blood fuck. You had absolutely nothing to do with this, Sirius."

It was his fault, but Sirius knew he wasn't going to win the argument with her. She was Slytherin and he was exhausted.

Instead, he changed the subject. "How is... Feathers taking all this?"

A carefully neutral mask crept across Andromeda's face. She scanned the room. "Cast a silencing charm. If I draw my wand, they'll notice."

Sirius had a hunch that his mother would notice the distinct silence coming from their corner of the room anyway, but he called his magic forward and cast the spell over them all the same.

He felt more than saw the tension drain from Andromeda's body as she pressed her shoulder against his.

"He's taking it about as well as can be expected." She looked down at her hands. "I love him, Sirius. More than I could ever dream of putting into words. And I'm going to marry him." Then, with more conviction: "I'm going to marry Ted-fucking-Tonks."

Sirius frowned. "My mother will burn you off the tapestry, 'Dromeda. You'll be disinherited."

She let out a broken sort of laugh. "I'm not sure I care. I mean it, Sirius. I'm going to marry him. I just... need time to plan."

"What about Fawley?" Fawley, who had yet to arrive. Fawley, who Sirius had yet to see in person. Fawley, who was meant to wed his favourite cousin.

Fawley, who Sirius would like to tear to pieces, just on principle.

Something flashed across Andromeda's eyes. She smirked. "That much, at least, I've figured out."

Sirius couldn't hold back a smile, even here and starved as he was. He loved conspiring with Andromeda. "Oh?"

Andromeda waved a teasing finger in his face and tsked. "It's a surprise. I can't wait to see your face, Siri. It'll leave him no choice. He'll have to refuse my hand. Lines will be drawn, hexes will be thrown, and I shall remain a free woman. It will be glorious."

Sirius smirked. "Never let it be said that a Black dinner ended without bloodshed."

Instead of the laugh he'd been hoping for, Sirius's words instantly sobered Andromeda.

"How are you doing, Sirius?" Her voice was hardly more than a whisper, even with the silencing charm.

He wasn't sure how to answer that. If he lied, she would see right through it and only worry more. If he told the truth...

Well.

Andromeda sensed his hesitation and took one of his hands into both of hers, gripping so hard his fingers turned white. "Any marks?"

Sirius shook his head and sighed. She wasn't going to let this one drops. "I haven't eaten," he finally managed.

"How long?"

Since Hogwarts. He bit his lip to stop the words.

She seemed to hear them anyway. "Jesus Christ, Sirius."

He wondered if Andromeda knew that she swore like a Muggle and when exactly, in her very clandestine courtship of Ted Tonks, that had happened. To him, it seemed like a rather obvious tell.

"How's Regulus?" she asked, when he said nothing.

Sirius scanned the room stuffed full of his various relatives. Kreacher led in a newly-arrived Uncle Alphard, his mother's middle brother who Sirius hadn't seen in person in quite some time. Uncle Alphard walked up to Walburga and Malfoy, accepted a glass of wine, and promptly downed the whole thing, seeming to need it in order to endure the ensuing evening.

Sirius had always liked Uncle Alphard.

Bellatrix and Lestrange huddled together with Narcissa on the opposite side of the room, talking in bawdy tones with the occasional meaningful glare at Andromeda and Sirius. Cygnus and Orion stood close to the door, both of them swirling crystal glasses of his father's best scotch.

Regulus was not in the room.

"He's probably hiding from Bella," Sirius said. "He's terrified of her."

"He should be," Andromeda muttered. Then: "But that's not what I meant, Siri."

Sirius knew that, of course. He just didn't particularly want to answer her. He felt an involuntary shudder ripple through his body as his mother's words from the other night echoed in his skull.

"He's safe," Sirius said. "I'll keep him safe. No matter what."

Andromeda gave him a look, and he almost cursed the pity in her eyes. She opened her mouth to reply, but just then, Crawley trailed into the room, followed closely by a visibly nervous Regulus and—

Andromeda made a choked noise in the back of her throat.

Sirius sat up straighter and dropped the silencing charm.

Julius Fawley was tall—taller than both Orion and Cygnus. All things considered, he was rather plain, especially for a pure-blood family named in the Sacred Twenty-Eight. His features were soft, rather than sharp and angular, and vaguely Eastern European. He was probably about Alphard's age—somewhere in his early forties—with boring, flat brown hair tied back by a silk ribbon that matched his tie.

Fawley shook hands with Orion, then Cygnus, kissed Walburga on the cheek, then ruffled Regulus's hair.

Sirius could see the murder in his brother's eyes from across the room.

When Fawley's eyes landed on Andromeda, the soft, mild-mannered expression on his boring face melted into the ravenous hunger of a feral wolf.

Andromeda dug her fingernails into the palm of Sirius's hand as Fawley walked over. As she stood, she pulled Sirius to his feet as well, then skilfully diverted her eyes: the perfect posture of a subservient bride-to-be.

The look didn't suit Andromeda at all, and Sirius wanted to make a rather snide comment, but her grip on his hand tightened.

Sirius couldn't tell if Andromeda was as truly scared of Fawley as she seemed, or if she was merely playing the part expected of her.

Bloody Slytherins.

All the same, Sirius swallowed his words.

As was proper, Fawley greeted Sirius first by bowing slightly and offering his hand.

Sirius internally cursed the sharp angle to which he had to crane his neck in order to properly look Fawley in the eye. He might be twelve and fucking short, but he was the Black heir, goddamnit, and if he was going to be tortured for it, it was only fair that he at least looked the part.

Julius Fawley smiled indulgently at him, as though—Black heir or no—Sirius was no more than five.

Sirius hated Julius Fawley.

"Sirius, it's a pleasure to finally meet you," Fawley said. "Your father has told me a lot about you. I hear you have quite the talent for wandless magic."

It wasn't particularly creative, as far as greetings went, and Sirius had heard an infinite number of variations of it. Hello, Sirius—an acknowledgement by name, to demonstrate that the party doing the greeting knows exactly who Sirius was. Your father said—Yes, yes, of course his father said. His father took any and every opportunity to make sure that all the other Ancient Houses knew that he had an heir, even a deviant one at that. Wouldn't want anyone challenging the power and... longevity of House Black.

And, of course, a talent for wandless magic. This, Sirius knew, was exclusively his mother's doing. She spread the rumours of his magic far and wide, often accompanied by little embellishments and white lies. Dumbledore himself never showed such an aptitude at his age. Honestly, Sirius had heard it so often and from so many different people that he'd never really bothered to check if it was true. It was all part of his mother's game. A message passed in hushed whispers the world over that said: He might be a deviant and a Gryffindor, but he is powerful. You have every right to fear him.

Sirius supposed that, in some circles, he really was quite famous.

No wonder McGonagall hated him. McGonagall, like everyone else, believed that Sirius used his wandless magic just as his mother intended: to assert his power over others and make them remember their place.

He was half tempted to assert his power now. Sirius bit back a nasty retort to Fawley and, more importantly, a hex aimed at an unmentionable place just to prove how powerful his wandless magic could be.

Instead, Sirius finally accepted Fawley's hand that had been left hanging in the empty space between them for almost an indecent amount of time.

"Pleasure's all mine, Mr. Fawley." Sirius released Fawley's hand and resisted the urge to wipe his own on the front of his Christmas robes, just to try to shake away the nothing that sparked across his skin. Instead, he tilted up his chin and opted for the type of idle conversation his father had tried to drill into him the moment Sirius said his first words. "Forgive my memory. What is it that you do, again?"

Sirius, of course, knew the answer, just as he knew the particular field claimed by each family named in the Sacred Twenty-Eight. Each Ancient House occupied a single seat on the Wizengamot, traditionally held by the eldest male. Together, the Ancient Houses made up fifty percent of the voting body, as the remaining twenty-eight seats were given to elected officials from wizarding districts around Britain.

Beyond the permanent seat on the Wizengamot, the Ancient Houses expected their sons to master a particular craft or trade, mostly in the interest of maintaining and expanding both their wealth and political influence.

The Averys and Carrows, for instance, ran the British division of the International Potions Guild. The Malfoys held elected positions in the Ministry and government, such as Abraxas Malfoy's seat on the Hogwarts School Board. The Notts and the Prewetts, having never been particularly amicable towards each other, had long-since been rivals on the professional Quidditch pitch, as well as in their own separate broom-making businesses. The Lestranges...

Well, these days, the Lestranges were mostly assassins for hire.

The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black were, traditionally, scholars and academics, with the occasional curse-breaker—like Cygnus—thrown in the ranks. (Though, from his uncle's stories, the curse-breaking done by Black curse-breakers was not so much as Ministry-sanctioned, traditional curse-breaking, as it was making sure that the curse in question only affected the intended party.)

More so than any of the other Ancient Houses, House Black was the unquestioned keeper of ancient and predominantly forbidden magic. The library at Grimmauld Place was renowned the world over, and despite the ever-present stench of Dark Magic that lingered in the air, it was Sirius's favourite room in the house.

"I work as a solicitor at my father's firm," Fawley said, with no small amount of pride. "My goal, of course, is to take up my father's seat on the Wizengamot. He's getting on in years, and, well. Let's just say that he's sided with the Old Man one too many times to be entirely comfortable. My father doesn't always... appreciate the interests of the Ancient Houses."

Fawley said it casually, but Sirius saw the anger lurking behind the whites of his eyes. It was the same expression his father wore across the room, just within earshot: unbridled ambition mixed with one hell of a superiority complex. It was a dangerous combination, certainly, but one his father would readily forge into a deadly weapon, given the right set of circumstances.

"Of course," Fawley continued, as if Sirius's attention was on him, rather than the political dealings of his own family, "I would have taken over his seat years ago—perhaps prevented one or two of the Old Man's more... liberal reforms—" Here, he nudged Sirius, as though they were old friends commiserating about a sudden string of foul weather. "—but House Fawley has an ancient binding spell that stipulates that the eldest son must be married and produce an heir before he is able to claim his full inheritance. Unfortunately, my full inheritance includes the seat on the Wizengamot. I would have married ages ago, but my career was taking off and I hadn't the time or the temperament for such things. Now, though—" His gaze cut to Orion. "—things have gotten a bit more... dire."

Sirius gulped. That's why his father had agreed to match Andromeda with Fawley, then. Out with the old, in with the fanatic.

Maybe Andromeda was right. Maybe this engagement wasn't strictly his fault.

It was just... politics.

Fawley's smile turned lecherous. He turned to Andromeda. "That, I am afraid, is why I have you, my darling."

Sirius had a sudden, horrifying suspicion that he and Andromeda—but Andromeda especially—had severely underestimated Julius Fawley. He wasn't so sure that Andromeda could outwit him on this, not if he was as dead-set on warmongering as Orion Black was.

Fawley offered his elbow to Andromeda.

Andromeda looked... bored, now, more than anything. Sirius felt his heart lurch.

This was so much bigger than an engagement and... Andromeda had no idea.

"Mind if we take a walk in the gardens before dinner?" Fawley asked her.

Andromeda nodded and clearly forced a smile. Every set of eyes in the room followed them as they made their way to the back. Then they were gone and the hushed tones of conversation picked up again.

Sirius was alone.

Normally, at these kinds of things, Regulus glued himself to Sirius's side, so neither of them were ever left alone and defenceless on the battleground of mind-numbingly dull conversations, but today, Regulus seemed to be holding his own. He stood by their mother's side, smiling up at her as she seemed to compliment him, then—Sirius cringed—amicably shaking hands with Lucius Malfoy.

Sirius's eyes drifted over the room, trying to stomp out the swell of panic in his stomach. He was the heir. He was expected to socialise. But he wasn't brave enough to go over to his father and Uncle Cygnus—though this was clearly the option that he was meant to take. They would talk politics and legislation, but in the same veiled, vaguely threatening manner that Orion and Walburga had his first night at Grimmauld Place. Sirius was only meant to bear witness to the war they started, until such time as they needed foot soldiers.

Frankly, he didn't have the stomach for it.

With Andromeda and Regulus gone, Sirius was utterly lost at sea.

Narcissa was glaring at him and occasionally harrumphing in his general direction, and Bellatrix and Lestrange were furtively whispering with each other in the corner opposite of Orion and Cygnus, occasionally gesturing at Malfoy, then at Sirius, then back to Malfoy.

If he was being honest, Sirius was as terrified of Bellatrix Black as Regulus. He'd sooner cut off his own foot than—

Beside him, Uncle Alphard plopped down on the couch with a heavy sigh. Sirius turned at the sound. His eyes widened in shock. Mostly, because not only was Alphard slouching on the couch, with one arm draped over the back and the other swirling a glass of expensive wine, but he also had his fucking muddy boots up on Walburga Black's antique coffee table.

"Um," said Sirius, intelligently.

"You're not going to tattle on me, are you, my dear boy?" Alphard asked, his tone far too casual for a man who was literally asking to be murdered by Sirius's mother.

"Uh." Sirius threw a nervous glance over his shoulder. Knowing his mother, she'd find a way to blame Sirius for his uncle's behaviour.

Alphard rolled his eyes dramatically and snorted a laugh, but Sirius didn't miss the bitterness behind it.

"She can't see us, Sirius," Alphard said, drumming his fingers against the back of the couch. "Little spell I mastered a long time ago. Concealment charm mixed with a healthy bit of illusion magic. She can see us, theoretically, but she'll instantly be compelled to look away and think that we're just two proper blokes having a chat." He took a sip of wine and winked. "I know a thing or two about wandless magic myself."

A smile crept across Sirius's face as he took the offered seat next to Alphard, though he was not quite brave enough to put his own feet up on the coffee table.

"Can you show me?" Sirius tried to hide the blunt force of his eagerness behind a carefully constructed mask of intellectual curiosity. All things considered, he was pretty sure Alphard saw right through it.

"Someday," Alphard said, with a far-off twinkle in his eye. He leaned in close. "As handy as this little parlour trick is, the spell won't last forever and Walburga has been onto me for years. I'll have to be brief, so I hope you can forgive my forwardness. How've you been, Sirius?"

Frankly, Sirius was getting sick and tired of evading that particular question. This time, he opted for a simple, completely bullshit, "Fine."

Alphard, instead of calling Sirius on the obvious lie like everyone else had, Alphard simply asked, "Do you know what it is that I do?"

Sirius opened and closed his mouth. For all its stops and starts, he was, quite frankly, having a difficult time following this particular conversation.

Alphard smirked. "Unlike that Fawley prat, my occupation might actually be of use to you."

"No," Sirius said, then amended. "I mean, yes. Vaguely."

Vaguely, in this context, meant not at all. Sirius hadn't seen Alphard in years—probably since his grandmother's funeral—and whenever his uncle's name was brought up, his mother tended to follow it with a string of curse words that was, objectively speaking, rather impressive. Aside from the occasional letter—usually filled with scathing commentary about the lifestyle choices made by Druella, Bellatrix, and Narcissa—Sirius wouldn't've known he had an eccentric uncle to begin with.

Eccentric was the absolute nicest thing Walburga said about her younger brother. Coming from her, it was almost a compliment.

"Didn't think so. It's not exactly a traditional career for a Black," Alphard said. Then, with a dramatic wave of his hand and a rather fond look in his eye, he continued: "I run a non-profit charity that cares for and rehabilitates magical creatures from all around the world. Your father—" Alphard pauses to throw a patented Black sneer in Orion's general direction. "—tolerates my choice in career because having a charity, no matter the... persuasion, on the books greatly improves the public perception of the Blacks. Plus, I'm told there are tax benefits."

Alphard handed Sirius a small card. On the front, there was the Black coat of arms: a snarling black dog with a screeching raven perched on its shoulder, wings spread wide. On the back, in perfect script, where Toujours Pur would normally be printed as a fair warning to all who came in contact with the Blacks, it read:

Black Sanctuary for Research & Rehabilitation of Magical Creatures

42 Constellation's Keep

Inverness, Scotland

44 0473 874 2832

"You're a magizoologist?" Sirius asked, dumbfounded.

"Ah, not quite. I'm a... field researcher and glorified veterinarian. My sanctuary provides potion ingredients and natural remedies to both magical and non-magical afflictions all over the world. Did you know that kelpie venom is not actually venom at all? It's more of a salve. They use it to heal themselves if they're injured. Wizards commonly use it in dittany. It can also be mixed into a paste with griffin feathers to tend even healed scars." He gave Sirius a look that was almost certainly meant to convey something. "Even scars from Dark Magic."

Sirius's mind immediately flashed to Remus, but he forced it back to the present. He'd ask Alphard about this salve later, when he wasn't surrounded by a whole bunch of people who hated every part of someone like Remus Lupin. Instead, Sirius said, "So you—"

"I help find creatures born in darkness and pain. The creatures I save are... Well, most of them come from the most horrific places and most have dealt with torture of one form or another all their life." Alphard let out a long, sad breath. "I can... relate. But instead of dwelling in their misery, I treat them with a kindness they've never known, and together, we try to find ways to help other... lost causes."

"Oh."

The silence was nearly suffocating, but so was being in a room with this many relatives. Sirius looked back down at the card in his hands. "What're the numbers for?"

Alphard's lip twitched up in a half-smile. "It's a Muggle phone number. My... partner insisted that we get one, given the surprising number of creatures that end up in Muggle zoos or homes. But, if your mother asks, it's the sanctuary's Ministry-issued registration number."

"Noted."

"Walburga," Alphard said, with a back-breaking sigh that spoke of the same existential weight of anguish and fear from years spent under Walburga's thumb that Sirius knew so well. "Well, she'd push me off the face of the earth if she thought she could get away with it." He nudged Sirius and put on a wry smile. "The secret, my dear boy, is that you must make yourself indispensable. You, of course, have a slight advantage. You're the heir. But—"

"Regulus," Sirius whispered on an exhale. Then, echoing his mother's threat: "If I'm not here, Regulus takes my place."

Alphard nodded. "Heir and a spare, as it goes. It just so happens that, in this case, our loving matriarch adores the spare and would greatly prefer it if—"

Sirius grit his teeth together. "I won't let that happen."

"Then you, my boy, must make sure that you are not dispensed of."

Like that was supposed to be easy.

Sirius was a Gryffindor, for Merlin's sake. He had a neon-fucking-target on his back.

Alphard ignored the apparent look of distress on Sirius's face. "I may be able to offer assistance in keeping you... breathing."

And wasn't that just a remarkable vote of confidence?

"How?"

"Your mother—if Druella's incessant gossiping is to be believed—has every intention of sending you to the Lestrange estate in southern France over the summer holidays to... dissuade you from your deviant ways. I needn't tell you what such a trip would entail."

Sirius very nearly heaved up the nothing stuff in his stomach. If there was one place on earth that could possibly rival the nightmares leaking from the walls of Grimmauld Place, it'd be the ancestral home of the Lestrange family, Wych-Elm Manor.

That, or Azkaban.

Sirius had only been to Wych-Elm Manor once, two years ago, when Falco Lestrange announced officially that his eldest son and heir had entered into an official courtship with Bellatrix Black. There'd been a party, not at all dissimilar from tonight, except with far more distant European relatives than even Sirius had known he'd had.

Wych-Elm Manor had never been wired for electricity or even modern plumbing. Candles floated around, following guests, not unlike the halls of Hogwarts, except these candles occasionally illuminated the literal blood pouring down the walls, as though from a fresh wound. The Lestranges were, as far back as anyone could remember, notorious for their particular... interest Dark Creatures. Instead of house elves, Wych-Elm Manor was staffed by a variety of enslaved Dark Creatures, all of them magically bound to the house, chained in silver, and starved. The Lestranges often organised Dark Creature hunts, in order to keep their house properly staffed and satiate the inbred hunger for the torment of intelligent beings. A vampire footman offered drinks and took the coats of guests. He was so gaunt and pale that, if it had not been for the ravenous creature flashing its teeth, Sirius would have mistaken him for a ghost. They kept werewolves and hags chained to the floor and, even more disturbingly, mounted to the wall once they were no longer of use. Banshee screams could be heard well into the night, haunting and nearly deafening, echoing through bleeding hallways.

On top of the tortured Dark Creatures, Wych-Elm Manor was home to no less than seven ghosts. But, instead of the stubborn, dead relatives that refused to move on, each ghost wandering the halls of the Manor was a victim of the psychotic madness of one Lestrange or another. All of the ghosts were violent, attempting to reap some tangible revenge on the family that claimed their lives. Two of them—Blair Vonfeldt and Ichabod Fletcher—were certifiable poltergeists: once human, but long, long ago. In death, their souls became so twisted in rage and hatred that the essence of their beings itself began to decay. In order to manifest themselves, they terrorised the living and feed on their fear. They could only exist, then, in such a place as Wych-Elm Manor, because without the constant terror and bleeding walls to keep what's left of their souls intact, the poltergeists would fade into nothing.

Well, almost nothing.

In the tome of ancient legends that Sirius found in the library of Grimmauld Place, it was believed that all poltergeists eventually faded into dementors.

"No," Sirius said after a long pause. "You don't need to tell me what would happen."

He'd be forged into a weapon, just like each of the Lestranges: carved out of stars and hewn in the fire of ancient hatred, to seek out and destroy blood traitors and Mudbloods. Whatever fragile moral compass Sirius claimed to have now would be ground to dust before his very eyes. He'd become a faceless soldier, waiting for his master to pull his string, waiting to execute the order to curse James Potter or Lily Evans or Albus-fucking-Dumbledore into oblivion.

"Hm," Alphard said, clearly tracking the frightening inevitability of it all as it danced across Sirius's face. "I'd much prefer it if you came to stay at my sanctuary instead."

Sirius blinked. He hadn't been expecting that.

"There would be... conditions, of course," Alphard said, tilting his head a little.

"What conditions?" Sirius demanded, ready to agree to just about anything that kept him in the United Kingdom.

"Your father," Alphard continued, as if Sirius hadn't spoken at all, "won't take too much convincing. He's always seen my work as an asset to Black politics. Plus, there's a good chance I'll have you mucking hippogriff pens, so he knows, at the very least, that you will be suffering. He'll take comfort in that."

Sirius pulled a face, but all things considered, hippogriff shit was better than Wych-Elm Manor. "He's not the one you'll have to convince."

Alphard just nodded.

"Your mother," Alphard said, without a hint of irony, "is the bane of my existence."

Mine too, Sirius thought.

It took five full seconds and Alphard's surprised laugh for Sirius to realise he'd said that out loud.

"I've had a lifetime to figure out how to get what I want from Walburga Black. She wants you out of the way, surrounded by pure-bloods, and to slowly torment you until you forget any Gryffindor notions that you may have acquired at Hogwarts." Alphard winked at him. "I can deliver on one... and a half of those, if you count mucking shit as torture."

Sirius managed to smile at the joke, but that was about it. His mind was elsewhere. "What about Regulus?"

Alphard's expression immediately sobered. "You need to know one thing about me, Sirius, before you even consider my offer. I am neither Gryffindor nor a hero, in any sense of the word. You also, objectively, need to understand that Regulus is not the one in immediate danger. As I said, he is the favoured son. You, on the other hand—"

"She wants me dead," Sirius said, bluntly.

"To put it mildly. Perhaps, in this circumstance, the right course of action is the Slytherin one. You cannot hope to protect your brother at any point in the future if you allow yourself to be removed from the game board now. The best thing you can do for Regulus is to make sure you're still breathing long enough to stand between him and Walburga when it all goes to shit."

Sirius's eyes snapped up to Alphard's. "You think it will? Go to shit?"

It was one thing for Sirius to speculate that his father was planning something. It was one thing for Regulus to whisper about wars and political manoeuvring in the dead of night.

It was another thing to hear it from an adult.

That made it real.

"Take a look around the room, Sirius," Alphard said, and Sirius did. "Take a look at the men to whom your father sold your cousins. Sons of pure-blood psychopaths, politicians, and sycophants. Your father is merely solidifying his allies and biding his time."

"To do what?" Sirius asked, though he already knew the answer.

"To declare war," Alphard said, "on an unprecedented scale."

Sirius bit his lip and tried to quell the overwhelming sense of dread that welled up inside of him. "Then... I can't just leave Regulus to face that alone. You don't know—"

Alphard cut him off with a sharp glare, and Sirius recoiled a little bit because, yeah. Alphard knew exactly what would happen if Sirius left Regulus alone at Grimmauld Place.

"It's your decision to make, my boy." Alphard reached over and squeezed Sirius's shoulder. "Take some time. You have enough to worry about right now, and both of us need to get through the next few hours, preferably unscathed. My offer stands for as long as you should need it."

As if on cue, Kreacher popped into the room and bowed reverently in front of Walburga.

"Dinner is waiting in the Hall, Mistress," Kreacher croaked.

Alphard waved his hand and dropped the concealment charm before anyone had a chance to look too closely at it.

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

Sirius tried his best not to salivate at the smell as he took his place next to his father at the table. Candles lit the hall, and thirteen places were set at the table with the traditional silver cutlery.

Sirius swallowed around a ball of nervous energy and tried his best not to fidget. He hadn't realised there were exactly thirteen of them about to take their places at the Christmas table. It was a stupid, old superstition, but nothing planned by one Walburga Black was ever left up to chance or coincidence.

Thirteen places at the table. The first to rise would be the first to die.

In almost all circumstances, Sirius Black was not one to blindly follow ancient superstitions. The hands of Fate already seemed to have it in for Sirius and he was already worn to the bone fighting that particular battle. Despite whatever vendetta Sirius had against any and all higher powers, things like this, well, they tended to be hauntingly self-fulfilling.

His mother wouldn't outright act on it, of course. She was a Slytherin. But she'd set the table for thirteen guests with a clear and menacing purpose: she meant to suss out the weakest link. She meant to frighten and intimidate everyone at this table into submission, to play her hand against Fate and carve a new universe in which she, Walburga Black was lord and master of life and death.

This... would be a contest of wills. One Sirius could not allow himself to lose.

He didn't need another death omen following him into his nightmares.

More importantly, if the ridiculously superstitious Ancient Houses were to learn that the Black heir had a death omen on his head—even one as arbitrarily common as this one—Sirius's longevity and viability to produce an heir of his own would be thrown into question.

There'd be legal precedent to name Regulus as the Black heir in Sirius's stead.

Julius Fawley could probably arrange something like that.

There was a dangerous gleam in his mother's eyes, as she watched the silent recognition of the thinly veiled threat flit over the twelve other faces in the room. Everyone knew what this was. At the other end of the table from him, Andromeda gulped and he could just make out the thin line of sweat that had begun to bead on her forehead. Regulus took his traditional seat next to Sirius and across from their mother, and Merlin, Sirius watched as his brother tugged nervously at his tie, intermittently flitting terrified eyes up from the table to catch Sirius's.

Vaguely, Sirius wondered if this was what Regulus tried to warn him about.

It hadn't mattered that he'd agreed to his mother's terms, that he'd bowed to her will already and the torture she's wrought in the past week. Regulus was still the favourite son, and Walburga Black would stop at nothing to oust the Gryffindor tainting her sacred bloodline.

Sirius set his jaw. He would not lose.

Everyone took their place and sat. No one dared to make any motion so as to indicate that they might be the first to stand.

The second the kitchen doors opened, Sirius nearly doubled over at the sudden, intense smell that drifted in. Gravy and meat, roasted vegetables and bread. All other thoughts flew out of his mind.

Salazar's fucking balls, he was so fucking hungry.

Plates floated in from the kitchen, followed by goblets and wine. Sirius watched with rabid, starving eyes as ham and gravy and all sorts of food covered the silver plate in front of him.

"A toast," Orion said, holding up his silver goblet, and Sirius forced himself back to the moment. Twelve identical goblets were raised in salutation. "To the honour of the Ancient Houses."

"To the nobility of our bloodlines," Rodolphus Lestrange said.

"To alliances, new and old," Julius Fawley added.

Lucius Malfoy grinned wide and leered at Sirius. "To the debts we've yet to pay."

All eyes fell on Sirius, waiting for the final toast from the Black heir.

Sirius glanced across the table and stared directly into his brother's eyes. "To the family we'd die to protect."

Regulus gulped, his eyes wet and terrified.

Sirius felt the weight of his words reverberate around the room.

Andromeda broke the tension with a rather non-traditional and halfway irreverent, "Cheers!"

The salute echoed in half-hearted little bursts. Moments later, the hall was filled with the scrape of silver and the clinking of glasses as everyone tucked into the feast.

Sirius hesitated. Any wrong move, anything seen as deliberate disobedience against his mother who'd starved him for over a week could be his downfall. He clenched his fists and valiantly tried to block out the smells of the tantalising feast in front of him, just out of reach.

He'd already given into temptation once, and it'd cost him dearly.

He would not lose.

"Sirius, darling," his mother trilled in an unnaturally light tone. He felt himself cringe. Darling was not so much as an endearment—pfft, as if his mother were capable of such a thing—but more as a necessary prerequisite to a threat made in polite company. "Aren't you hungry?"

There was an audible pause, as a palpable tension settled over the room.

She'd spent a week starving him to the brink of insanity and now she wanted him to... eat?

Honestly, he hadn't seen that coming.

His mother was playing a dangerous game, one in which she was five steps ahead of Sirius and he had no feasible way to catch up.

It was his own life on the line and he was flying blind.

Sirius's eyes drifted from his mother's forced smile to his brother. Regulus bit his lip, pointedly glanced at Sirius's plate of food, then almost imperceptibly shook his head.

Sirius had neither the desire nor the strength of will to resist any longer. If this was part of her game, then he willingly surrendered, if only it meant he'd have food in his belly again.

Fighting every instinct to forgo manners and decorum and simply dig into his food with ravenous fingers, Sirius picked up his knife and fork and sawed off a tiny piece of ham, barely larger than the pad of his thumb. He raised the meat to his mouth, then forced himself to chew, pushing aside the animal instinct to growl and inhale his plate whole, before his food could once more be ripped from beneath his nose.

Sirius swallowed, and conversation resumed around him, but to him, it was muted and dull. He couldn't bring himself to tear his attention away from the food in front of him, his mother's scheming and politics be damned.

He ate slowly, deliberately, and even then, his stomach ached after only a few bites of the rich food. With a flick of his wrist he prayed escaped his mother's attention, Sirius transfigured the ridiculously expensive wine in his goblet into water. He began adding long sips of water in between each bite, and thanked his lucky stars that no one was in a particular hurry to leave the table. Merlin only knew when he'd get food again , if at all, before he returned to Hogwarts in another week. Sirius wasn't about to waste this opportunity by eating too fast, only to upset his stomach and lose his dinner.

An hour in, Sirius's plate had long since gone cold, even though only a mere half of his food had successfully made it into his stomach. He continued to take deliberate, measured bites, focusing entirely on the mechanical movement of his hands as he cut the meat, the slow grind of his jaw as he chewed, the constriction of his throat as he swallowed, then, the gradual swell of the comforting warmth in his stomach. He could hardly be expected, then, heir of no, to follow even one of the conversations around him, consumed as we was by the inconceivable miracle that was his full belly.

That was, of course, until Andromeda slammed her fist down on the table so hard that she almost upended her empty plate.

Regulus nearly jumped out of his seat. Sirius nearly choked on his tiny piece of carrot.

No one else bothered with such a visceral reaction to Andromeda's outburst, other than to give her their clear and undivided attention.

Andromeda Black was livid.

With her non-clenched fist, Andromeda grabbed Julius Fawley's wrist and dragged his hand—that had, apparently, been resting on her upper thigh, the git—onto the table and in plain view of everyone.

"All right," Andromeda practically growled. "Let's just get this over with, shall we?"

"Aw," crooned Bellatrix, lasciviously leaning across Lestrange to get a proper look at her sister. "Ickle Andy is nearly gagging for it."

Narcissa snickered.

Andromeda glared daggers at her sisters.

Sirius frowned, because it was so unfair. If he ever made a comment like that within earshot of his mother, he'd be hexed into an early grave.

Of course, he'd never even consider teasing Andromeda about Julius Fawley. That would also end with Sirius buried under six feet of earth.

"You will wait until we retire to the parlour, Andromeda," Cygnus said, his voice a remarkably calm counterpoint to the general demeanour of his daughters. "As is proper."

"We haven't even had dessert yet," Narcissa added, a smirk dancing on her lips.

"I do not care," Andromeda said, punctuating every word. "We all know we're likely to be stuck at this table for a few more hours, at least, and, frankly, I'm not sure I have the patience for it. So—" She turned fully in her seat to face Fawley next to her. "—Just get on with it, would you?"

Fawley's gaze drifted from Andromeda to Walburga, waiting for permission. Sirius narrowed his eyes, then put down his knife and fork. This, too, was part of his of his mother's insidious game, and Sirius sent up a silent prayer that whatever Andromeda had up her sleeve, it would be enough to win. Otherwise...

Sirius didn't even want to consider otherwise.

Walburga inclined her head, a malicious smile creeping across her face. "Proceed, Mr. Fawley. Dessert will hold for another few minutes."

Fawley smiled and pulled Andromeda's hand to his lips to kiss it.

Andromeda rolled her eyes and sighed dramatically.

"Andromeda Black," Fawley began, his voice taking on a rather salacious tone that wasn't entirely appropriate for polite company. "You are the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on—"

Narcissa snorted a laugh, but covered her mouth at Druella's glare.

Andromeda merely tilted her chin up so that she could sneer at Fawley properly. "I know that. Do better."

"Andromeda!" Druella hissed.

Fawley, to his credit, was not deterred in the slightest. "You are a remarkable witch who—"

"You know absolutely nothing about me except for my last name," Andromeda snapped. "Do not presume that your conclusion to that sentence will even be remotely adequate."

This time, Fawley's composure wavered. Sirius watched as something akin to rage flashed across his eyes.

"Andromeda, I am not a violent man," Fawley said, with all the false pretence of a man who kicked puppies to pass the time on lazy Saturday afternoons. "But I would easily fight an army for the right to call you my wife."

Yeah. The army was called Ted Tonks and Sirius had money on the Hufflepuff.

Then again, Andromeda was quite the force to be reckoned with on her own.

"I will marry you," Andromeda said, through gritted teeth, "on one condition."

Druella slammed her goblet down hard on the table. "Oh, come now, Andromeda, you're being unreasonable. He's—"

"Let her speak, Druella," Walburga Black cut in. There was a gleam in her eyes as she calmly glanced between Fawley and Andromeda.

Sirius felt a chill creep up his spine.

"I will marry you," Andromeda said, this time drawing out every word, "if and only if you agree to take the name Black."

Silence.

Druella let out a mournful sigh and buried her face in her hands. "Andromeda, that's ridiculous. You have to—"

"It's happened before," Andromeda snapped, with a harsh glare at her mother. "Charis Lysandra Black only agreed to marry Caspar Crouch if he took her name."

"Charis Black's line died out," Cygnus said.

"Not entirely," Alphard muttered into his goblet.

Sirius wracked his brain, trying to recall the obscure branch of the Black family tapestry. He knew the name, of course. Charis, daughter of Arcturus. Older than both of his parents, perhaps by half a generation, but for the life of him, he didn't remember the names of any of her children or what had happened to them. He made a mental note to look into it later. It seemed... important, especially if what Andromeda said was true.

"Arcturus Black had no sons, no one to carry on his legacy," Andromeda explained, evenly. "Arcturus appealed to his brother, Sirius Black II, the patriarch at the time, and begged him to allow Charis to carry the Black name into her marriage, and whatever children they bore to take up the Black brand, rather than that of the Crouches."

"You are not the eldest daughter. That would be me," Bellatrix sneered. "Why should you carry on Father's name?"

"You're as good as a Lestrange already." Andromeda inclined her head at Narcissa, her tone every bit as derisive as Bellatrix's. "And Cissa's a bloody Malfoy. She even looks like one. Charis wasn't the eldest, Bella. She was the youngest. Callidora was already married and Cedrella was disowned for marrying a Weasley. Charis was the only eligible child. As am I."

Andromeda took a moment to compose herself—or psych herself up, Sirius wasn't sure—before she levelled her gaze on Orion and Cygnus, then Fawley, in turn.

"I am the last eligible daughter of Cygnus Nigellus Black," she said, with all the nobility in her blood. "Uncle, Father, Mr. Fawley. I ask you to not allow my father's line to die with him. Allow me instead to carry the name my father gave me into my marriage. Allow my children to bear the immortal words of House Black upon their skin. Let me do this, in order that the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black may take up new roots, that our tapestry remain strong and proud for generations to come."

No one spoke.

Merlin, Andromeda could talk a good game.

Although Sirius couldn't quite hide a flinch at the mention of the brand to be placed on Andromeda's hypothetical children, he had to admire the genius of her plan. He was a little hazy on the details surrounding Charis and Caspar Black and their descendants, but he could tell from the faces that the table that Andromeda's brief accounting had, at the very least, been factually accurate.

And, holy fuck, it was brilliant, wasn't it?

The way she'd phrased it, stressing her commitment both to future generations of pure-blood Black heirs as well as preempting the impending end of her own father's line and legacy with his daughters' marriages. There was no way Orion could outright deny her, not without risking irreparably offending his brother-in-law.

Civil war, within pure-blood houses, was nothing to be trifled with.

Orion frowned, deep furrows appearing on his forehead. "The choice is yours, Mr. Fawley," Orion said, and really, as much as it was a surrender to Andromeda, it was his most diplomatic option.

Andromeda preened, and sent Sirius a wink from across the table. This would all be over in minutes. Fawley would storm out, the curse of thirteen be damned, and Andromeda would remain single until such a time as her father found a man willing to give up his own family name in order to take that of the Blacks: a nearly impossible task given the current state lack of eligible bachelors and heirs amongst the Ancient Houses.

It'd give Andromeda time, anyway, to run away and marry Ted Tonks.

For the first time in what felt like forever, Sirius wanted to shout for joy and to revel in Andromeda's victory.

She was minutes away from freedom.

Then, under the table, Regulus snatched Sirius's hand and squeezed tight.

Slowly, his heart suddenly in his throat, Sirius turned to face his brother. Regulus was pale and stared unblinking at the table in front of them. The only sign of life was the vice grip he kept on Sirius's fingers.

Something was wrong.

Julius Fawley cleared his throat.

"Mrs. Black," he said, his voice cool and collected, "I assume our agreement is still valid?"

All eyes darted from Fawley to Andromeda to the remarkably impassible face of Walburga Black. Even Orion looked at his wife, his expression giving away just a hint of surprise.

Only Regulus remained still, his gaze focused straight ahead. Sirius was sure his fingers would be bruised tomorrow.

"Of course, Julius," Walburga said, calmly. "House Black never breaks its word."

Alphard reacted first, before Fawley could say another word. "What agreement?" he demanded. Walburga didn't so much as blink in acknowledgment. "Walburga, what agreement?!"

Fawley took Andromeda's hand, once more bringing her fingers to his lips. She turned slowly to look at him, her eyes betraying just a hint of rising panic.

"I accept your condition, Andromeda," Fawley said. "I would be my honour to take the name of Black."

Andromeda's face went deathly pale. Her mask slipped. "W-what?"

Because, fuck, somehow Walburga Black had still won.

"Congratulations, Andromeda," Walburga said, a faint smile on her lips. "Your marriage shall bring great honour to your father and to House Black."

Andromeda opened and closed her mouth, searching for words that would no longer come.

Alphard slammed his fist onto the table. "Merlin's fucking tits, Walburga, what did you do?!"

Orion cleared his throat. "I would like to know that as well."

Walburga shrugged and planted a placating kiss on her husband's cheek that was entirely for the benefit of everyone present, rather than out of any sort of affection. She swirled her wine and took a sip, her gaze levelling on first Andromeda, then Cygnus and Druella.

"I believe," Walburga said, "I just saved your house from ruin, Cygnus. Ordinarily, such a favour is accompanied by gratitude."

Cygnus frowned. "What?"

"Your daughter—" Walburga spat out the word, her lip curling as she glared at Andromeda. "—has disgraced both your name and this house with her relationship with the Mudblood, Edward Tonks."

Sirius's blood ran cold.

He didn't think it was possible for Andromeda to pale any further. There were tears in her eyes.

"They've been... intimate for quite some time, I believe," Walburga continued, ignoring the stunned expressions from everyone around the table. "Years, if I'm correct."

Druella was nearly as pale as her daughter. "Andromeda. Is... Is this true?"

Still, Andromeda did not say anything.

Alphard regarded his niece with an inscrutable expression. He turned again to Walburga. "That is not... a light accusation to make, Walburga. How can you—"

"My source is reliable, Alphard," Walburga said, cooly. "And I followed up on the information myself."

Impossibly, Regulus's grip tightened, and all the air flew from Sirius's lungs, as though he'd been punched.

Andromeda made the connection a heartbeat after Sirius.

Regulus.

Regulus had betrayed Ted Tonks to the wrath of Walburga Black.

"Reg?" Sirius breathed.

His brother was close to tears, but he made no move to look at either Sirius or Andromeda.

"How could you?" Andromeda whispered, desperately, and that was an admission of guilt itself, wasn't it?

Still, Regulus said nothing and stared blankly ahead.

Alphard scrubbed a hand over his face. "Fuck."

"Mr. Fawley," Walburga explained, ignoring the breaking hearts of those around her, "agreed to marry Andromeda, despite the fact that she's been... tainted, because he needs a wife to assume the entirety of the Fawley estate, including his father's seat on the Wizengamot. Should either his brothers or his father's challenge this agreement, their case will be dealt with swiftly and they will lose. There is no clause in the laws of House Fawley that prevent the male heir from assuming the name of another Ancient House."

"That's because it's unprecedented!" Alphard shouted. "Caspar Crouch was the fourth son of a fourth son, not the bloody heir!"

Walburga ignored him completely. "Mr. Fawley has been well compensated for his willingness to take Andromeda Black as his wife and the Black name as his own. One fourth of Sirius's inheritance will be transferred to his Gringotts vault upon the completion of the marriage ceremony."

"One fourth?" Orion asked, raising an eyebrow at his wife.

Walburga waved him off. "Hardly even a dent in our fortune, dear, and one hundred times that gold already in the Fawley's vaults."

Neither Julius Fawley nor Orion contradicted her on this.

Walburga trained her piercing, black eyes on Andromeda. "The only reason, Andromeda, you are allowed to remain a member of this family is because you have not yet sullied yourself to the point of bearing a half-blood bastard. And, as it happens, you are... useful to my husband's political alliances. I hereby formally recognise your engagement to Julius Fawley. You will have no further contact with Edward Tonks for the remainder of your days, nor will you have any sort of correspondence with either of my sons until such time as you have borne a son of your own."

That, finally, seemed to stoke the fire in Andromeda's veins. Color returned to her face and she flushed red, her face hardening into a scowl. "You can't possibly—"

At the same time, Alphard cut in, "Walburga, this is not—"

Walburga's eyes flashed dangerously as the brunt of her fury was trained on Alphard. "Plot and scheme all you want, brother, but never forget that I am Matriarch of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. I will do whatever I feel is necessary to ensure the survival and purity of my bloodline for generations to come. You, of all people, have no room to question my actions."

Alphard snapped his jaw shut with an audible click.

Cygnus cleared his throat. "What of this Mudblood—Tonks—that defiled my daughter, Walburga?"

Walburga gave him a reassuring smile. "He is being dealt with as we speak."

At that, Sirius yanked his hand away from Regulus.

This was his fault.

Regulus let out a small sob, and covered his mouth with both of his hands.

Andromeda said, "No. No! You can't do that. He hasn't done anything wrong. I won't fucking let you touch him!"

She made to stand up.

Druella was quicker. One minute she was sitting in passive shock, and the next, she was firing a sticking jinx at her daughter, effectively gluing Andromeda to her chair.

"Andromeda Black, don't you dare leave this table," Druella snapped.

Andromeda squirmed against the curse, her eyes wild and desperate. "Let me go, Mother! Please!"

Druella did not so much as blink.

Sirius sat frozen, unable to do anything.

Andromeda stopped squirming, then, in one movement, drew her wand and shouted, "Expetcto Patronum!"

A silver winged horse, tinged in starlight, sprung forth from Andromeda's wand and galloped around the table. Both Lestrange and Bellatrix flinched away in surprise and horror. Druella let out a yelp.

Andromeda didn't wait for anyone else to react.

"Find Teddy! Save him, goddamnit!" she shouted at her Patronus.

The next moment, the horse nickered and disappeared in a shimmery, silver mist.

Andromeda let out a breath.

Walburga drew her wand, leaned forward, and pointed it at Andromeda's throat.

"Try another trick, girl," Walburga Black hissed, her voice low and dangerous. "I dare you."

Andromeda said nothing, just fixed Walburga with a steely glare as she lowered her wand. "I will not let you hurt him."

"You will do as you're told. Otherwise..." A gleam appeared in Walburga's eye, as the point of her wand tracked from Andromeda to Regulus. "Otherwise, whatever punishment I see fit for you shall also be given to my son for withholding the name of your Mudblood for as long as he did."

Regulus let out a small whimper.

Sirius felt his heart leap. "No. No, Mother, please. He didn't—"

He did. He betrayed Tonks and Andromeda, but it didn't fucking matter.

Sirius wouldn't let anything happen to Regulus. He'd made a promise.

"Learn your place, Sirius," his mother snapped, not taking her eyes off Andromeda. "I am Matriarch of House Black. I shall punish my son as I see fit."

Sirius's eyes tracked to Andromeda, and he let her see every bit of his desperation to protect Regulus.

It wasn't fair to ask this of her. He knew that. This was her freedom, her chance of happiness, of escaping everything they both loathed. She'd have to sacrifice everything, if she agreed to this.

It wasn't a fair thing to ask.

He asked—begged—anyway. He'd give anything, burn any bridge, if only it meant Regulus was safe, no matter what his brother had done.

He prayed that maybe—just maybe—Andromeda might understand that.

Sirius saw her surrender a second before his mother did.

"I... I will obey, Matriarch," Andromeda breathed, a little more life draining from her face with each word. "Don't... Don't hurt Reg."

Regulus had tears tracking down his face.

"Say it," Walburga sneered. "Accept his proposal."

"Julius Fawley," Andromeda said, her voice flat. "I will accept your hand in marriage and welcome you into the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black."

Fawley put his hand over his heart, in an illusion of genuine happiness. "I am honoured."

"A toast," Orion said, once more raising his goblet. "To the formal engagement of Andromeda Black and Julius Fawley, and the generations of Blacks to come from their line."

"To Andromeda and Julius," several voices muttered.

Neither Sirius, Regulus, nor Alphard raised their glasses.

Sirius just felt... numb.

"Kreacher!" Walburga called, not more than second after Orion finished the toast.

The elf popped into the dining room next to his mother's chair. "Yes, Mistress?"

"Bring out the dessert. We shall be retiring to the parlour shortly."

Not likely, Sirius thought.

There was still the death omen and contest of wills to contend with.

Five minutes later, Sirius's half-full plate was whisked away and replaced by a large slice of chocolate lava cake. He sighed, resigned, relieved that, at the very least, he'd had half a Christmas dinner to sustain him for the foreseeable future. It wasn't much, in the long run, but it was more than he'd had since he'd come home.

Silence echoed against the scrapes of forks and dessert plates as twelve people ate their desserts. As subtilely as he could manage, Sirius pushed his lava cake away from his body, trying not to wrinkle his nose at the smell.

He really fucking hated chocolate.

"Sirius."

His spine straightened and his eyes snapped up to his mother's in alarm at the sound of his name.

She smiled sweetly at him, and Merlin, it was almost putrid. "Aren't you going to eat your dessert?"

Panic and dread clawed their way once more into the pit of his stomach. He shook his head.

"I had it made especially for you."

Fuck.

This was part of her game.

Because, of course, she wouldn't allow him to even have this.

She merely salivated at the opportunity to tear him down bit by bit, allow him the slightest of reprieves, only to rip the air right from his lungs once again.

If he ate that cake, he'd have only minutes before he'd have to rush to the toilet and lose what little dinner he'd had to begin with. He'd be the first of thirteen to stand.

She'd torture and damn his soul in one fell swoop.

In hindsight, he should have known.

Still, he couldn't stop himself from saying, "But... I'm allergic to chocolate."

Slowly, his mother's eyes tracked to Regulus. She raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow and the implication was clear.

Obey, or Regulus takes your place.

Swallowing his pride and instinctual will to survive, Sirius mustered whatever courage he had left, then picked up his fork and shoved a huge chunk of chocolate cake into his mouth. He chewed, then swallowed. Another bite, then another, all without breaking eye contact with his mother.

His stomach turned, his insides tied themselves in knots, rioting against Sirius's own stubbornness not to give any more ground in this final battle of the evening. He tasted bile and cocoa and his eyes burned with unshed tears, then—

Then, Regulus stood up.

No.

No, no, no.

Not him. Please, not him.

Twelve sets of eyes stared at Regulus in shock.

Regulus, with tear-stained cheeks, rumpled robes, and a proud tilt to his chin that could only be pulled off by a Black. His eyes were wet, exhausted. Beautiful.

Damned.

Fuck.

Sirius felt his stomach turn over for a whole different reason.

"Enough," Regulus said, bowing his head. "That's enough. Please."

Then, he turned on his heel, and stalked out of the dining room.

His stomach rolling and heaving, Sirius waited only a heartbeat before he ran out of the room after his brother.

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

Sirius spat into the toilet, as his stomach convulsing for the final time. He flushed the meagre remains of his dinner, then cast a half-arsed Scourgify at his mouth, but couldn't quite get rid of the horrible taste of bile and chocolate.

Merlin, how his bones ached.

This wasn't supposed to happen. He had all but tasted victory, even in the wake of Andromeda's defeat. His belly had been almost full, for the first time in days, and he was going to outlast his mother in her bid to curse him into an early grave.

How had she managed to destroy everything with a fucking chocolate cake?

He closed his eyes, then leaned back against the bathroom wall, a boneless heap on the floor.

Regulus sat on the sink, kicking his legs out occasionally and biting his nails. Every once in a while, Regulus's eyes would dart to the bathroom door.

Sirius used the last dregs of his magic and his strength to cast a silencing charm and lock the door.

They were in the first floor half-bath, and with the rather dramatic exit they'd made, Sirius didn't expect them to be disturbed any time soon. His mother would be too busy trying to save face.

She'd set her heir up to die, but instead, Regulus had taken his place.

Even Sirius hadn't expected that.

Sirius scrubbed a hand over his face, utterly exhausted. He opened his mouth, still searching for words, but for the second time that evening, Regulus was quicker on the draw.

"You need to realise, Sirius," Regulus said, "that you can't always save me. I have to make my own choices."

Sirius squeezed his eyes shut. He didn't know if he had the strength left in him for this conversation. "Like you chose to give up Ted Tonks?"

A pained expression flickered across Regulus's face, but he nodded. "Yes, like how I gave up Ted Tonks."

"He could be dead, Regulus. And Andromeda—"

"Mother gave me a choice, Siri," Regulus snapped, as he jutted out his jaw in defiance. "She knows about your friends, okay? About the half-blood and James Potter. She needed something on Andromeda, to force her into complying with the marriage, so she gave me a choice. Your friends, or the name of Andromeda's Mudblood."

Sirius's breath caught in his throat.

No.

"I gave up Ted Tonks," Regulus continued, forcing conviction into his voice, "because if I gave up your friends, I'd lose you forever."

"Regulus—"

"Your actions have consequences, Sirius. You chose Gryffindor. You chose them over your family."

"No that's not—"

Except, it was true, wasn't it?

Sirius steeled himself, but changed tactics. "Fine. You're right. You're right because I don't fucking regret it. But, Reg, you can't think for one bloody second that anything comes before you. You're everything, Regulus."

"You made a choice, Sirius. And I made mine. Right or wrong, it doesn't fucking matter. Either way, people are going to get hurt." Regulus's eyes sparkled with an unnatural wisdom far beyond his eleven years. "We're soldiers, you and I. We always have been. And this? This is what it means to be born into a war."

And, really, what could Sirius possibly say to that?

"Actions have consequences," Regulus said again. "And no matter the price, I will always choose you, Sirius, until the very fucking end. Even if I damn myself in the process. Even if I break your fucking heart."

Sirius pushed himself to his feet, stumbled a bit, but managed to scramble over to his brother, enough to pull Regulus into a suffocating hug against his chest. Regulus clawed at the fabric of Sirius's dress robes, pulling him impossibly closer, and burying his face in Sirius's neck.

"I can't lose you, Reg," Sirius breathed into his brother's hair. "I'd burn the stars from the bloody sky if I lost you. I need you to—"

"Stars fall just fine on their own, Sirius," Regulus said, pulling back. "You and I know that better than anyone."

"Fuck, Reg, I—"

Outside the door, Sirius heard the sound of footsteps and Uncle Alphard's clipped tone. Both Sirius and Regulus went rigid.

"Orion, you can't be fucking serious. He's been through enough. That pasty little prat has no right to—"

"This is not your house, Alphard!" came Orion's snarled reply. "Nor do you have any say on how I make sure my heir pays his debts."

Fuck.

Sirius heart nearly leapt out of his chest as his father's fist pounded on the door.

"Sirius! Get out here. Now," Orion boomed, still banging on the door.

Resigned and too exhausted to fight the hands of fate any longer, Sirius waved away the locking charm and reached for the handle.

He knew what this was. Of course he knew. How could he not? Lucius Malfoy had been leering at him all evening, nearly drooling at the thought of having his revenge for the scar that Sirius had etched onto his face.

Regulus grabbed his free hand and yanked Sirius back, his nails digging into the tender skin above Sirius's wrist hard enough to leave marks. Regulus's expression was inscrutable, a perfect mask that made him look far older than he was.

"You could still run, Sirius." His brother's voice was hardly louder than a whisper.

"What?" Sirius choked out.

Regulus nodded slowly, then looked away from Sirius, straight at their joined hands. "You could run. Get to the back door, head down the alley, then catch the Knight Bus somewhere. Head to the Potters, maybe. If James is as good as you say he is, I'd be willing to bet he'd take you in, even on Christmas. You'd be free, Sirius. You'd be safe."

And, Merlin help him, for three full heartbeats, Sirius actually considered it.

He imagined James's face when he knocked on the door, a little surprised and a lot relieved. His glasses would be all crooked and his hair all wonky, but he'd laugh and pull Sirius into a hug. Sirius would cling to him, no matter how much it hurt, because, fuck, he'd be safe and loved and it would all be okay. James would introduce him to his parents. Sirius pictured Fleamont smoking a pipe and smiling so that his eyes crinkled in the corners, and James's mother—Merlin, why couldn't Sirius remember her name?—would be wearing a sari, just like James said. She'd be beautiful and kind and would probably share James's caramel eyes. She'd give him a hug too, because despite the cruelty of his own mother, on some level, Sirius recognised that mothers were supposed to hug their children—well, their children and lost scions of Ancient Houses that appeared on their doorstep on Christmas Day.

James would drag him by the sleeve into the dining room. It'd be smaller, but cosier and a thousand times more inviting from the ornate dining hall at Grimmauld Place. It'd smell of food and family and whatever the fuck curry was. Even if James insisted his mother's cooking was terrible, Sirius knew he'd devour it like a starved man—hell, he was a starved man—and savour every bite, and every little labour of love that Mrs. Potter had put into the dish. They'd make polite conversation, smile and laugh, then retire to the parlour for cocoa and ghost stories that lingered well into the night.

Then, well past midnight, he'd crawl into bed with James, a pillow between them, and beg him to let him stay, maybe forever. He could be the brother James always wanted and Sirius could finally have a family who loved him.

Except...

Sirius already had a brother.

A brother who loved him, irreconcilably and infinitely.

A brother for whom he'd sworn he'd burn down the heavens.

And as much as he loved James Potter—as much as he craved his own safety and peace of mind—Sirius Black could never leave Regulus behind.

Not even if it meant weeks of starvation and futile hope. Not even if it meant opening the door and facing Orion Black and Lucius Malfoy.

"I'm sorry, Reg," Sirius whispered, as he watched Regulus's eyes fill up with tears. Sirius reached for him, pulled his brother close, then planted a kiss on his forehead. "It has to be this way. I can't run. Not now."

Because if he ran, Regulus would take his place.

Regulus sobbed something that sounded like Stupid, bloody Gryffindor, but it was mostly drowned out another round of his father's incessant pounding on the door.

"Sirius!"

Sirius schooled his expression. Took a breath.

It was time to face the gallows.

Sirius opened the door.

"Hello, Father," Sirius said, frankly amazed at the neutrality of his own voice.

Orion scowled down at him, his eyes darting to where Regulus was astutely gazing at his feet behind Sirius.

"Alphard," Orion barked, "take Regulus into the parlour. I need to have a word with my son."

Alphard looked like maybe he wanted to put up a fight, but Regulus, ever obedient, walked around Sirius and took their uncle's hand, practically dragging him away and effectively leaving Sirius alone with their father.

Orion was silent for a minute, just long enough to hear the heavy doors of the parlour shut behind Alphard and Regulus. Then, he said, "You know what's about to happen?"

Malfoy.

Malfoy was about to have his revenge.

"Yes, sir," Sirius said.

Orion gave a curt nod. "You are not to make a sound. You are not to fight back. You are not to further disgrace your name or this house or, so help me, Sirius, I will have Kreacher rub salt into your scars."

And, Merlin, part of Sirius—the dark and angry part that had, up til now, laid dormant in his very bones—wanted to sneer and tell his father how Malfoy had screamed when Sirius turned the Sectumsempra on him. How it'd almost felt good, seeing Malfoy suffer for daring to lay a finger on Remus Lupin.

Sirius thought, in his own way, Orion Black might respect that.

That terrified him more than anything else in this house.

Sirius had never wanted to earn his father's respect. His father was a monster.

Even as the silence stretched between them, Orion narrowed his eyes and growled, "A Black always pays his debts, Sirius. Am I understood?"

Sirius thought of the debts he owed Malfoy: one for the Sectumsempra scar and another for vowing to never betray Remus Lupin. He'd pay his debts, even without his father's threats and warmongering, because the ransoms on his flesh and name meant that he'd saved Remus from pain. It'd be worth it in the end.

Sirius glared up at his father. "Yes, sir."

Orion grunted in response, then grabbed the back of Sirius's neck and yanked him forward. He corralled Sirius towards the parlour, and the great doors flew open at a flick of Orion's wrist. Sirius stopped abruptly, then shook his father off and took two steps forward.

He stood in the centre of the dinner guests. Andromeda was off to his right, her face streaked with tears—whether from her recent engagement or what was about to happen, Sirius didn't have the presence of mind to say. Bellatrix and Narcissa each had a hold of one of Andromeda's arms, seemingly in an attempt to hold her back should she try something drastic. Lestrange stood on Bellatrix's other side, ever the imposing shadow, absently chewing on his fingernails and looking excessively bored. Fawley, too, looked bored, but carried himself with far less flamboyance than Lestrange; he was still a guest in this house, no matter the overwhelming success he'd had at dinner. Walburga stood next to her two brothers and Druella, as still and as imposing as a portrait. Alphard had both of his hands clamped tightly on Regulus's shoulders, who stood in front of their uncle and had eyes only for Sirius.

Lucius Malfoy, his robes open and strangely billowing in the draughty breeze from the open door, stood opposite Sirius in the centre of the room. His wand was drawn and pointed at Sirius's chest, and he stood in a duel pose.

"Father, please," came Regulus's strangled voice. "You don't have to—"

But at Orion's glare, Alphard clamped a hand over Regulus's mouth. Part of Sirius wanted to lash out at Alphard, to decry him for daring to silence Regulus, but then he saw the wash of anguish flitter across Alphard's face. He watched as Alphard ducked his head, his eyes squeezed shut, and he refused to open them again. It was the same look reflected in Andromeda's eyes, and in Regulus's tears.

And, Merlin, Sirius understood.

There was nothing any of them could do, save for keep themselves out of the line of fire.

Sirius swallowed, prayed to whomever or whatever might be listening that he'd somehow be able to tap into some of that Gryffindor courage that seemed to make him more stupid than brave, then glared over at Malfoy.

Sirius Black fucking smiled. "Do your fucking worst, Malfoy."

Malfoy didn't hesitate. "Sectumsempra!"

He sliced his wand through the air, once, twice and—

Sirius flew back, hitting the wall so hard behind him that he hardly registered the pain from the curse. His vision swirled, his lungs protested the sharp intake of air, his ears rang and could no longer discern any sound other than the pounding of his own heart, then—

He looked down.

His robes were torn, revealing his formerly white undershirt, and all he saw was—

Blood. Blood. Blood.

Blood and fucking pain.

He tried to cover the wound, to put pressure on it to stop the flow of red, except—

Merlin, fuck, his hands weren't big enough. His flesh was torn from his collar bone to his opposite hip bone.

Remus has a scar like this, the utterly insane voice in his head supplied.

Vaguely, he registered that Regulus was screaming. Andromeda was sobbing.

He thought maybe his mother and Malfoy were laughing, but really, he couldn't be expected to focus on anything, except—

Blood.

A manic laugh bubbled up in his own throat, all gurgley and unnatural sounding.

He was going to stain his mother's rug.

He wheezed in a few more rapid, half-crazed breaths, and then his world went dark.

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

The thing was, Sirius Black didn't ever remember having good dreams.

He remembered the nightmares, of course. Rather vividly, in fact. But he couldn't recall a single moment in his life that his subconscious had ever ventured into "good dream" territory. It'd always been Grimmauld Place and his mother's laughter and various curses and dark fates.

Which was why Sirius Black was immensely confused when he found himself standing in a well-lit, yet unfamiliar atrium, in front of a mirror.

He knew it was a dream because the edges were sort of... fuzzy and everything felt just a bit surreal. His reflection, too, was... different.

He was taller than he remembered being and older, too. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. His hair was longer and synched in a neat knot at the base of his skull. His right ear was pierced twice, once in the cartilage and one hoop on the lobe, and both pieces of silver jewellery caught in the warm light, matching his silver eyes perfectly. His features looked sharper, a bit more sophisticated, and in all honesty, the only reason Sirius recognised himself was because he was a perfect male clone of his mother, from her younger portraits.

Maybe this was a nightmare after all.

"There you are!"

Sirius turned, because he recognised the voice.

It was a little deeper, a little rougher, a little thicker on the Welsh accent, and perhaps happier than Sirius had ever heard it, but he knew deep in his bones he'd recognise that voice anywhere.

Remus Lupin leaned in the doorway, his robes open and hands shoved in the pockets of his Muggle suit pants. He, too, was older—about the same age as the Sirius whose reflection occupied the mirror—and, frustratingly, about a head taller. His hair was still a curly mess, with perhaps a tinge of silver around his temples, but Sirius figured that could be the lighting. More scars than Sirius had ever seen lined Remus's face; the ones Sirius was used to seeing were pale in comparison to the deepest gouge across the bridge of Remus's nose. His eyes...

Merlin, his eyes.

Brilliant amber, like morning sunshine through a glass of whiskey, flecked with a wild and impossible ring of gold.

Fuck.

Remus Lupin was the most gorgeous man he'd ever seen.

A smile tugged at the corners of Remus's lips. His eyes darted to the floor as he caught Sirius staring and Sirius thought that maybe Remus blushed a little.

Frankly, it was adorable.

And, Merlin's saggy tits, what kind of thought was that?

"What're you doing in here?" Remus said, and Sirius thought that maybe there was something tacked on to the end of that sentence. It was short, but wasn't his name—maybe a nickname?—but, for whatever reason, his brain refused to interpret the syllables and it sounded mostly like gibberish. "You know they can't have a proper party without you."

Sirius had no clue who they were nor were there any indications as to what sort of party this was, other than, perhaps, his and Remus's robes, which were fancy, but nothing like the kind of robes expected at any sort of pure-blood function. He didn't know how he was supposed to answer that, so he just gave a half-hearted shrug and said, "I was just thinking."

Remus took a step closer. Then another. So close that Sirius took a step back to avoid any sort of physical contact. This might be a dream, but his subconscious had never exactly been kind to him. He had every reason to believe that the tattoo's curse would follow him into the netherworld.

Remus stood close, but didn't quite touch. Sirius got lost in him: the twitch of his lips, the intricate leyline pattern of his scars, the infinity of his eyes. Remus smelled like the forest after a rainstorm, just a little bit wild and maybe a bit like what Sirius imagined good dreams were supposed to smell like. It was intoxicating, maddening, and Merlin, Sirius was drowning in Remus Lupin.

Then, Remus Lupin reached out and took Sirius's hand.

And...

And...

There was no pain.

How was that possible?

Sirius stared down at their joined hands, and, after a moment's hesitation, laced their fingers together. Remus's hands were big, his fingers nearly long enough to curve around the tips of Sirius's own, and callused. His fingers were as scarred as the rest of him, little nicks and scrapes that Sirius would swear looked like fucking bite marks, and a few of them were swollen and crooked from frequent breaks.

A longer scar, thick and smooth and obscenely deep, cut diagonally across the palm of Remus's left hand. Sirius traced a finger over the ridged scar. It took a moment for him to recognise the scar, but when he did, Sirius very nearly swallowed his own beating heart.

He had given Remus this scar, when he'd dragged his mother's silver knife over Remus's hand to draw blood for the paint that now covered the flag that was peached on top of Gryffindor tower.

Because it didn't hurt—well, mostly just because he could and it felt so right—Sirius drew Remus's left hand to his mouth and kissed along the line of the scar.

A far-away look crossed Remus's face, accompanied by a small, familiar smile. "You need to let that go, Siri. I told you a long time ago that I'd never hold that scar against you. It's okay." His smile quirked upwards and he tilted his head, a little bit of mischief sparkling in his eyes. "Besides, what does it matter anyway? I'm scarred all over."

Sirius frowned. "Yes, but only once by me."

Remus just smirked at him, the infuriating bastard. "Twice."

Sirius's eyes snapped up, alarmed. "Twice?! When did I—"

Remus laughed lightly, but instead of answering, he did the most ridiculous fucking thing possible.

He grabbed Sirius's tie, reeling him in close, one hand on Sirius's hip and the other tracing the line of Sirius's jaw with his thumb. "You'll see," Remus whispered, his breath ghosting over Sirius's lips.

Then, Remus Lupin kissed him.

A whimper escaped Sirius's lips before he could stop it, and he felt Remus chuckling softly against him. He felt Remus's smile, the scar on his bottom lip, and Merlin, the entirety of Remus's body pressed close against him. Sirius simply melted into Remus, because he couldn't do anything else. He'd never been kissed before, not like this, and certainly not by Remus Lupin.

It wasn't the sweet, gentle kiss that came at the end of every fairytale. No, this kiss had an edge of desperation to it, a soul-shattering longing of two long-lost lovers separated by time and circumstances. Remus bit at his bottom lip and Sirius gasped, his mouth sliding open against Remus's, and Merlin, fuck. Remus tasted as wild as he smelled, and he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was already addicted to this. He'd never give it up. He'd burrow inside his own head, retreat inside his dreams, if it meant that he could keep kissing Remus for one minute more.

Fuck his mother, fuck her plans and her schemes. Fuck his uncle and his father and the whole bloody lot of them.

None of that mattered.

Nothing mattered, save for Remus Lupin.

As if a fire had been lit in his very blood, Sirius kissed him back for all he was worth. His hands went up, one hooking around Remus's neck to anchor himself, and the other tangling in Remus's stupid, wonderful hair. He traced scars under his fingertips, trailed them down Remus's neck, just as Remus's lips moved from Sirius's to trace across his jaw and to the curve behind his ear.

Nearly growling a laugh, Remus nipped at Sirius's hoop earring. "Can't wait until you get that fucking tongue piercing."

Merlin's tits, Sirius felt his knees buckle.

Remus caught him, a strong arm around his waist, holding him impossibly close. Remus broke the kiss and leaned his forehead against Sirius's. The gold in his eyes was fierce, nearly drowning out the amber, and Merlin, Sirius had to look away from the intensity of Remus Lupin's eyes.

He felt Remus's half laugh, just before he planted a kiss on Sirius's forehead. "Gods, I fucking love you."

Sirius figured if he died now, he'd die happy.

His reply was on the tip of his tongue, because of fucking course, he loved Remus Lupin. Even in the deepest recesses of his soul, where nothing remained but the gnarled darkness he'd inherited from his family and incarnated with his own choices, Sirius Black knew that he'd only ever be content here in Remus Lupin's arms.

It was where he fucking belonged.

But then, Remus pulled back slightly, and yanked on Sirius's hand. Remus was still smiling, and his hair was wonderfully tussled from Sirius's fingers. "Come on," Remus said, something akin to mischief in his eyes. "You owe me a dance, Black."

Remus tugged him into the main hall. Sirius followed, his hand never leaving Remus's, but he pulled up short when Remus pushed the doors open.

The hall was huge, ornately decorated, but had the same fuzz around the edges that the atrium had had, which Sirius mostly attributed to the fact that he was dreaming. Hundreds of people filled the hall, all of them dressed to the nines, and...

All of their faces were blurred.

Sirius couldn't make out a single feature, other than the stunningly perfect face of Remus Lupin.

Voices echoed around him, but they sounded distant, and none of the words made any sense to him. Laughter and applause and the joyous cries of a feast were all drowned out by his own heartbeat.

In the centre of the crowd, a man and a woman held each other close, slowly moving in a circle, their arms draped around each other in a familiar embrace. Though he could see neither of their faces, Sirius felt a pull towards them, a swell of love and devotion that came from somewhere deep inside him. The man was tall, lean, and held the woman as though she were his entire world. The woman wore a white dress, and Sirius wished he could see her face, because besides Remus, she was the most beautiful thing in the room.

"This is a wedding," Sirius said, stupidly.

Remus smiled at him, nodded, then pulled him into the crowd.

Remus's arm wrapped around him again, holding him close, and his right hand interlaced with Sirius's left. Remus led the dance, sweeping Sirius across the floor, sometimes passing through other couples as if they were nothing more than ghosts. Sirius stumbled at first, unaccustomed to following instead of leading, and it took him a few tries to get the backwards steps right. All the while, Remus smiled at him, laughing softly whenever Sirius stepped on his foot.

Remus moved them in a set rhythm, though Sirius could hear neither music nor the echo of their footsteps against the floor. It felt like they were floating, gliding through a faceless, nameless crowd, lost entirely in their own world, somewhere between reality and a dream.

Remus kissed him again, this time softly, almost tender, just a press of lips against his own, and, Merlin, Sirius felt the remnants of his soul shatter. He stared up at Remus, his fingers moving to trace the scars across his face that Sirius had wanted to touch for so, so long.

"How are you even real?" Sirius whispered, and the words were out of his mouth before he could even fully process them.

Remus smiled down at him, his eyes almost sad. "I'm not," he said, then inclined his head. "At least, not yet."

That seemed to snap Sirius out of whatever Remus-induced daze he'd been in. "What?"

"You're dreaming, Sirius."

Sirius rolled his eyes. "I gathered that, thanks. Mister and Missus over there don't have faces."

That seemed to throw Remus, just a little. He glanced over at the newlyweds, then back at Sirius. Then, composing himself, Remus said, "They will one day."

Sirius was quiet for a moment, mulling that over, before he decided on the question he most wanted to ask. "Is this the future?"

Remus shrugged, a half shoulder tilt that merely ended up pulling Sirius closer against him. And, honestly, Sirius wasn't about to complain about it. "Yes and no," Remus said.

Sirius swatted his chest. "What's that supposed to mean, arsehole?"

Remus laughed and planted a quick kiss on his forehead. Sirius's face softened immediately. "No, in the sense that no future is written in stone, most especially yours. Fate has it in for you, Sirius, and you're playing a dangerous game against her."

"I—" But Remus didn't give him a chance to continue.

"And, yes, in the sense that this is a possible future. A common future, even, in almost every version of reality."

Sirius's face scrunched up in confusion. "Someone else's wedding is a common occurrence in my future?"

Remus took a breath, then leaned in close. "Of all the things that happen to you, of all the tragedies and horrible choices you'll be asked to make, this is where you're happiest, Sirius."

Sirius felt it, too, in the air, all around them. He was happy, and Merlin, the feeling was so foreign to him that he hadn't recognised it for what it was until Remus had mentioned it.

He was beginning to realise, with sobering clarity, that there was an infinite gap between content and happy.

Sirius shoved the feelings down, vowing to deal with them later. Right now, he had questions. "So... I'm dreaming of the future. Does that make me a Seer?"

"Ah, no." Remus spun them around, bringing them closer to the newly-wed couple. "In any dream, Sirius, time is not only relative, but a fluid thing. The future is yesterday and the past is right now. In your dreams, you exist at every moment of choice you've ever had, at every point of possibility and inevitability. In your dreams, you are the god of your own universe, and not even the claws of Fate can reach you." He leaned in close, and whispered in Sirius's ear. "You're safe here, Sirius."

And, Merlin, Sirius believed him.

He made a vague gesture towards the door, towards the atrium, towards the edges of his dream. "But out there...?"

Remus's face sobered instantly. "What year did you come from, Sirius?"

"1971," he answered immediately. "Christmas. Shit, it was horrible and—"

Something in Remus's eyes flashed, a dark and dangerous thing that would terrify Sirius if he didn't already know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was safe here, in Remus's arms. "Malfoy," Remus growled. "Sectumsempra."

Remus trailed a hand down to Sirius's chest, tracing a line from his collar bone to just above his navel, then back up to the opposite side of his chest to trace the bisecting scar. Sirius shivered, and though, in this dream-world, the scars from Malfoy's wand had healed ages ago, they still felt fresh and raw under Remus's touch.

Or, maybe, it was because, in the waking world, Sirius was still bleeding from these very wounds.

"Yeah," Sirius breathed.

Remus pulled him impossibly closer. "Everything's about to change, Sirius. Fate is cruel to you, and you wage a dangerous war against her. You need to know that you are not fighting this war alone. You have people that love you, more than you'll ever know. The choices you face seem impossible, I know, but you're the only one brave enough to make them. You are the wild card in the great plan of creation, Sirius. You're the only one who can change anything."

Sirius swallowed the lump in his throat. "If I make the wrong choices... All this might not happen, will it?"

Remus closed his eyes and sighed. "That is a possibility, yes."

Sirius only hesitated a moment before asking, "And you and me? Do... we...?"

This time, Remus leaned in close and kissed him lightly, cupping Sirius's face in his hands. "You and I are inevitable, Sirius Black. In every version of reality, fate be damned."

"Oh."

Sirius allowed himself to be held tightly, as Remus twined his arms around Sirius's neck and hugged him against his chest. Sirius dug his fingers into Remus's robes and squeezed his eyes shut, entirely unwilling to let this moment pass. It was a miracle, of sorts, wasn't it? That he could touch Remus Lupin without excruciating pain, that his subconscious took him to this place where he could have a moment to just fucking breathe after a week of suffocating at Grimmauld Place. This was...

This was every wish upon a star that Sirius had ever made.

"Remus?" Sirius whispered, against his shoulder, still unwilling to pull away even slightly.

"Yeah?"

"Am I able to touch you in the future?"

It seemed a stupid question, given that Sirius was currently wrapped up entirely in Remus Lupin, but he couldn't dismiss the possibility that this was just a figment of his imagination, just his brain trying to make up for torturing him with years and years of nightmares with one, really perfect dream.

"Yes," Remus said. "But you have to figure it out on your own."

Of-fucking-course he did.

Remus pulled back, a small smirk dancing on his lips. "And, if, for instance, I try to talk you out of it... Don't let me, alright? I very much enjoy kissing you and it'd be a sad reality for both of us if I couldn't."

Sirius wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but he smiled all the same.

Somewhere in the distance, a door slammed, followed by a shrill, yet familiar voice.

His mother.

Merlin, how did she get here?

Sirius felt himself tense up, a sudden, icy-cold panic constricting around his heart. Remus, too, turned in the direction of the noise, his face set in a scowl, as he gripped Sirius just a little tighter against him.

After a moment, a hand reached up to cup Sirius's face. "You need to wake up, Sirius. You're in a nest full of vipers. You'll get bit while you sleep if you hide here much longer, and I'm not sure you'll survive the venom this time."

Immediately, Sirius felt tears well up in his eyes. "I don't want to wake up."

Remus pressed his forehead against Sirius's. "I know, love. I know. But the vipers are whispering around you, plotting and scheming, and you need to be awake to hear it. You need to know of the choice that waits for you."

Sirius shook his head, furiously. "No, Remus, I can't... I can't go back there. Please, don't make me go back."

"I will always be here, in whatever reality you choose to create for the both of us, no matter how long it takes you to find your way back here." Remus placed one, last, lingering kiss against his forehead, before whispering. "A lion's heart beats inside your chest, Sirius Black. Don't let them poison it. Wake up."

"No, Remus, please, don't—"

✦ - ☽ - ✧ - ☾ - ✦

Sirius woke with a strangled gasp, held back only by the hand he immediately clamped over his own mouth. He bit down on his fingers, as wave after wave of pain washed over him.

Merlin, he felt like he'd been carved in two.

Vaguely, as awareness and reality settled around him, he felt the dream slip from his memory even as he shook off the last vestiges of sleep.

His foggy mind reached for it, desperate to cling to something good, even in this horrible place, but all he could grasp was the echoes of Remus Lupin's last words.

You need to wake up, Sirius. You're in a nest full of vipers.

He was staring up at the ceiling of his own room, recognisable only by the familiar bedposts and horrible, green wallpaper, visible even in the dark. He tried to sit up, but had to bite back a moan of pain as the recently-closed slashes on his chest tugged and threatened to bleed once more. He flopped back down, carefully, and lay motionless and shirtless on his bed. After a moment of working up the courage, he traced a careful finger down his own chest, still sticky with recently-dried blood, tracing out the pattern of scars Malfoy had left him. There were two of them, both long and deep, forming a crooked X across his breastplate. The edges of the longer scar nearly reached his hipbone and the shorter one had narrowly missed making contact with his tattoo.

He was truly marked, then, as he had marked Malfoy. Scarred and disfigured and never again the paragon of beauty. Just another scarred and battered bit of steel, destined for the forges, to be hammered into a gleaming, silver sword.

If he had strength left in him, Sirius thought he might cry.

But it wasn't the pain or the harsh reality of his own disfigurement that had torn him from his dream of Remus Lupin.

He wasn't alone in his room.

Neither his mother nor Uncle Alphard had yet realised that Sirius was awake. Sirius could tell from their vague, flickering shadows in the candlelight that they stood near the door to his room, but he didn't dare raise his head, lest they realise that he'd woken up.

This may be the only strategic advantage he'd have, beaten and scarred as he was. Sirius was Slytherin enough not to let it pass through his fingers. He'd been raised by vipers, after all.

"You forget your place, Alphard," his mother hissed, and even though Sirius could not see her face, he could feel the severity of her sneer. "And you forget your debt to me."

Alphard's voice came out in a derisive laugh. "I owe you nothing, Walburga. Do not try to pretend that you have anything to hold over me. I am not Andromeda, nor am I sloppy with the secrets I keep."

"I know the true nature of the sanctuary that you keep, brother," Walburga said, the threat clear in her voice.

Where a weaker man might have shrivelled up in fear or balked at his discovery, Alphard merely scoffed. "As does half of Britain. And as would your idiot husband if he could see past the revenue my sanctuary brings to the Black vaults."

Sirius's eyes widened in wonderment. He'd never heard anyone talk about his father like that. Orion commanded authority and radiated danger, even when he was not standing in the room. No one Sirius had ever known had dared insult him, let alone to his wife.

His mother was silent for a minute, and Sirius was half convinced she was about to throw a hex at Alphard, but then she said, "How was Andromeda able to touch the Mudblood, Alphard?"

Alphard simply laughed, softly to himself, and made no effort to deny the blatant implication that Walburga left hanging in the air between them.

Alphard was the one who helped Andromeda break the blood curse.

There was a way around the magic of the tattoo, and, impossibly his mother did not know what it was.

Sirius felt something like hope swell inside him.

"Tell me what you told her," Walburga demanded, "and maybe I will allow you to walk away from this house unscathed."

Sirius could practically hear Alphard's eye roll. "And what is it that you plan to do to me, Walburga? Shall I be scarred and starved like your son, or will you simply whisper the true nature of my sanctuary to your little band of warmongering fascists?"

Sirius completely ignored the mention of his own predicament in favour of zeroing in on the frigid tone of his uncle's voice. He'd known it in theory, of course, but Sirius was finally beginning to understand the entire scope of this war between Walburga and Alphard. It was one of subterfuge and mutual assured annihilation. Whatever the true nature of Alphard's sanctuary, it was invaluable to the Blacks in both reputation and financial status. Walburga would never risk its destruction.

"I could force you to marry."

Sirius could feel the thinly veiled, yet palpable threat in his mother's voice, even from across the room, but again, Alphard merely barked out a laugh. "Please. I fucking dare you to ask that of me."

Walburga's tone was clipped. "As Matriarch of the House of Black—"

Alphard interrupted her. "Who, exactly, do you expect me to marry, Walburga? You've sold off Andromeda, so there's no hope of keeping the line as pure as you'd like. And none of the Sacred Twenty-Eight have daughters even close to marrying age, except perhaps Molly Prewett, and I'm sure you'd just love that."

His mother made a disgusted noise. "The Shafiqs have their eldest. She's nearly seventeen."

Sirius felt his stomach roll in disgust. Alphard was over twice her age.

"And she's as stubborn as her father," Alphard shot back. "You need a bitch who will roll over and submit."

His mother paused, then tried a different approach. "All it will take is a few owls to the families across Europe. Any girl with blood pure enough to touch you will beg to be taken into House Black."

Alphard let out a long sigh that, to Sirius, sounded almost like a growl. "Fine, Walburga. Fine. Let's say I marry. Then what? I produce an heir?"

It was Walburga's turn to scoff. "If you can keep it up long enough to consummate the marriage."

Alphard ignored her jab entirely. "I am the eldest son of the previous heir to House Black. The only reason I am not the current scion of this fucking house is because Father married you off to our fucking cousin because you couldn't inherit on your own. I could have challenged Orion's claim as patriarch after Father died, but I didn't, because I don't fucking care." His voice dropped nearly an octave. "But I swear on the bones of Salazar-fucking-Slytherin that if you threaten me again, I'll be married by the end of the bloody week. Because you can bet that if I had a blood heir, no arbitrator in Britain would deny my claim on the inheritance of House Black. Blood is thicker than any marriage, even one born of incest."

For the first time in his life, Sirius thought he detected a slight wavering in the cadence of his mother's voice, but it could have been anything. A trick of the shadows, a fever settling on his half-delirious mind.

But no... it was there.

"You wouldn't," Walburga said, as though she believed he would.

"I would burn your whole fucking empire to the ground, if it meant keeping my interests safe. You might get away with your war against the Wizarding World, but you'd be a fool to declare war against me, Walburga."

Whatever hesitation or fear there'd been in her voice, it evaporated in a second. "And now your interests include my son?"

Sirius held his breath.

Alphard did not miss a beat. "I will offer you this olive branch exactly once, Walburga. If he agrees, you will allow Sirius to spend the summer holidays with me in Scotland until he graduates from Hogwarts. I will provide him with a magical tutorage that even your money cannot buy. He will be educated by a Slytherin, in the ways of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, and will be well entranced with a socio-political standing in society equal to or greater than my own by the time he graduates from Hogwarts. No more scandals, no more threat of civil war amongst the Ancient Houses, and no more blood debts owed to the Malfoys."

To Sirius's utter disbelief, his mother seemed to actually be considering the offer. "And in exchange?" Walburga prompted.

"We end all talks of my marriage, hypothetical or otherwise. You vow to protect my interests as if they were your own. And—" Alphard paused here, for what Sirius suspected was dramatic effect. "—in exchange, I will name Sirius as my heir. He will inherit Constellation's Keep when I pass, and all the financial benefits that accompany it."

His mother merely hummed in response. "Sirius will need to be present at Grimmauld Place at times for certain... functions, pertaining to his duties as the Black heir."

"We can arrange for those as they come up," Alphard replied.

Walburga paused, then her voice turned cold again. "What of my other son? Do you have plans for him as well?"

Alphard let out a low, rumbling laugh. "I am not the scion of House Black. I only need one heir, Walburga."

Part of Sirius wanted to give up his position and shout at Alphard, beg him to save Regulus too, because, fuck, if Alphard had this kind of sway, surely he could—

"If I agree to this, you are to have no further contact with Regulus until he comes of age," Walburga said. "And you are to ensure that Sirius's interaction with his brother will be limited to Hogwarts and mandatory family functions."

This time, Sirius couldn't quite hold back a whimper.

Both his uncle and his mother abruptly stopped their conversation. He heard his mother's footsteps creak across the floorboards to his bedside. He forced his expression to neutral and tried to even out his breathing as much as possible, despite his thundering heartbeat. He prayed that his mother wrote off his whimper as a symptom of his mangled chest.

Which, all things considered, was almost certainly a contributing factor.

After a moment, Walburga seemed to decide that Sirius was, indeed, asleep. "We will continue this discussion later."

Alphard, too, had taken up a position at Sirius's bedside, opposite of his mother. "I have one more condition, Walburga. While he is under your care, neither you nor Orion nor your damned house elf is to lay so much as a stinging hex on him. He is not to be harmed. Am I understood?"

Sirius heard his mother brush past Alphard on her way to the door. "I have not yet agreed to anything, brother. And, until I do, I have every right to do with my son as I please."

Then, with that, she was gone, nearly slamming the door behind her.

Sirius kept his eyes closed, his breaths painfully even and slow. Then:

"Exactly how much of that did you hear?" Alphard's voice was calm, with maybe just a hint of genuine... amusement.

Sirius popped one eye open and admitted defeat, thanking his lucky stars that at least it hadn't been his mother who had caught him. "All of it."

Alphard sighed. "Of course you did."

"I won't leave Regulus behind."

Alphard scrubbed a hand over his face. "You need to understand something, Sirius. Fate is a cruel and capricious god, but she is also a liar. She may weave her web and spin her tales, but her futures are never guaranteed. Your future, Sirius, is written only by the choices you're given. You need to be brave enough to decide your own future."

Sirius swallowed, unable to say anything to that.

Alphard let out another sigh, cast a quick Lumos, then said, "Merlin's tits, look at you."

Sirius couldn't exactly imagine that it was a pretty picture.

Alphard half-turned, and gestured towards a small, ornate box on his desk. "I told your father that I'd brought you a present. A case of inkwells. Happy Christmas."

Sirius furrowed his brow. "Thank you?"

"Of course," Alphard continued, "what I didn't tell your father is that they're not inkwells at all. Just cleverly disguised as inkwells."

"What are they?" Sirius said, because Alphard seemed to be waiting for him to ask.

"Potions. The red one's dittany. Hard to come by, that, but I happen to have an abundant supply of kelpie venom. Not much, but a little. The blue is a nutrition potion, so you won't completely starve, and the black is a sleeping draught. It's not much, but it should last you until you return to Hogwarts if you use them sparingly."

Sirius opened and closed his mouth a few times, shocked. "T-thank you."

"Don't let your father catch you drinking from what he believes to be inkwells. He'll think you've gone mad." Alphard paused. "They won't let up on you, Sirius. Not even if you look like this."

"I know," he muttered.

"Right now you need to endure. I know it's horrible, and there are vipers nipping at your heels, but Sirius, if you want to want to learn how to kill a god, you will have to make the choice to do so yourself."

And, Merlin, what an impossible choice it was.