Alex.
Hated.
Transfiguration.
What was even the point in it? When, in the life of Alex Fawley, would she ever need to turn a cocktail glass into a rat? It was ridiculous. Everything was ridiculous.
The words on the page jumbled in front of her, letters rearranging themselves into words that didn't make sense. Alex squinted to try and reorganise them, but they only floated around in front of her, stubbornly refusing to form anything that would be recognisable from looking at a dictionary. Alex massaged her forehead with her palm to try and clear the headache building behind her eyebrows, but that only succeeded in aiding her to lose her place.
Alex glanced absently at her watch: It was only six AM. She had been there for just an hour. Funny, she could have taken so many pictures in that time, and the sunrise would be making it's debut over the Forbidden Forest in half an hour, well enough time to grab breakfast and set up everything that she needed to...
No, she would regret not doing the work later, when her mother opened those results and sent her that disappointed expression, when her twin brother came back with perfection written all over his letter. Even though she worked twice as hard as him. Even though she didn't want a ministry job.
Squeak!
The sound of the chair across from her being pulled back startled Alex out of her thoughts. She leapt out of her seat by instinct, heart beating fast enough to beat Sonic the Hedgehog in a race through Green Hill Zone.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Can I sit down?" Sirius Back was talking to her from beneath a curtain of black goth hair.
Alex didn't move.
Maybe if she didn't move, he wouldn't be able to see her.
Or was that a T-Rex?
...
...
...
He was still looking at her.
Waiting.
Alex coughed, and shuffled slightly, "Um, yeah. I was... I was just leaving anyway."
"Oh." Was it her imagination, or did Sirius seem disappointed?
Alex advanced hesitantly, grabbing the book she had been reading and retreating again. Sirius was still watching her. In his left hand, he held two small bags that Alex recognised as being the ones the school provided for taking food from the hall. Alex wondered who he was planning on meeting here. She was glad she dodged the bullet of having to awkwardly try very hard to look like she wasn't listening into their conversation.
"Um, Bye." Alex could feel Sirius's eyes on her as she made her retreat, like a knife hovering between her shoulder blades. She increased her pace. This was what the rest of Gryffindor house tactfully referred to as 'running away'.
Alex Fawley did not want to know why Sirius Black was trying to sit at her table, not when there was a whole library of options out there, the majority of them empty. Maybe today was upside down day. Alex squinted at her reflection in the glass of a window as she passed: Still scrawny, still skinny, mousey brown hair still falling into dull green eyes. Nope. Alex was still as plain as she had been yesterday.
The more likely answer to the question of Sirius Black was that finally, after pushing the limit with how many times she could mess up in front of them for the last time, the Marauders had decided to set their scope on Alex for their next prank.
"Alex!"
Alex nearly wept with relief at the sound of the familiar voice. Logan grinned at her as he made his way over, clearly overlooking the panic on her face.
"Hey. I was just coming down for breakfast." Alex hugged today's chosen torture device (also known as a Transfiguration textbook) closer to her chest to demonstrate where she had been.
Logan shook his head, blonde hair tumbling forwards as he did, "You work too hard, Al. You'll be smarter than Rowena Ravenclaw by the time you leave."
"Aha." Alex forced a laugh. Bracelet. Camera. Necklace, "Yeah."
Logan gestured down the hall with a gigantic hand, "You coming?"
"Yeah. Just..." Alex fumbled for an excuse, "I wanted to take a picture of the sunrise."
"Another one?" Logan raised an eyebrow, but brushed off Alex's stammerings, "It's cool. I'll swing by the Great Hall and meet you on the East Side? What floor?"
"Sixth. Professor Wrangell's classroom." Alex smiled her gratitude, trying not show quite how relieved she was, "And thanks. You're a life saver."
Logan grinned, "No problem."
{===}
Sirius dropped the breakfast bags in the rubbish. He had suddenly lost his appetite.
He sighed as he stepped out of the library, feeling so much more empty than when he stepped in. Was this feeling... Rejection? Oh no, Sirius did not like that at all.
"Didn't go too well?"
Remus Lupin raised an eyebrow as he swept his gaze up and down Sirius Black's exhausted frame. He was leaning against the wall, looking much too suave to be Remus Lupin.
"Shut up." Sirius shoved Remus's face as he passed, but not before he saw the grin that split open his friend's expression.
"You shouldn't get Wormtail's hopes up, you know." Remus's voice was so judgey that Sirius was about to make a comment about it before he realised that calling someone 'Judgey McJudger' wasn't really an effective insult.
Damn. He was losing his edge. His edge had been the one thing he had going for him.
"I wasn't trying to sleep with her." Sirius grumbled.
"No. Which is what got me worried in the first place." Remus commented, "Imagine it: Sirius Black, the Famous Family Disappointment, caring enough about someone to get them breakfast."
Sirius moved unconsciously to stand in front of the bin where he had so wastefully offloaded two bagels wrapped in pristine white paper. He narrowed his eyes at Remus, "You're more evil than they make you out to be, you know."
"I mean, obviously." Remus pointed at the badge pinned to his chest, "I'm a prefect and a Marauder and a werewolf. Might as well call me Satan and have done with it."
"I'll trump all that with just my last name." Sirius smiled lazily, and leaned into the window pain. His disappointment was fading, replaced by a bone-deep kind of exhaustion.
Remus grinned, "Just so you know, your secret is safe with me."
"What secret?" Sirius asked self consciously.
Remus tapped the side of his nose, "Exactly."
Sirius frowned, "No, I'm serious. What se-"
"The others are coming." Remus declared with a surreptitious glance up the corridor, "We need to do something distracting. I told them I'd call them when I found you."
"What do you- argh! Again? Really?" Remus shot Sirius with another spell to send him toppling to the ground.
"Hey, Padfoot!" James's voice echoes from down the corridor. Both he and Peter had hurried to their friend's side in seconds, eager to take part in whatever was going on, "What happened?"
"I have been felled, betrayed by my own friend!" Sirius declared, "Quick, there is something I need to tell you before I die: Under my bed in the dormitory there is a loose floorboard. Open it and you will find three Snickers, a used tissue and the nuclear launch codes for Narnia. Don't touch the Snickers, but you can have the rest."
"I'm not sure which of those items raises more questions." James pondered thoughtfully.
"I didn't know you'd read Narnia." Remus commented.
"I haven't." Sirius looked up at Remus, not nearly bothered enough to get up, "I watched the movie like everyone else."
"I don't know you." Remus declared.
"Ah!" Sirius cried, "Moony's an amnesiac! Wormtail, kiss him!"
Peter looked alarmed, "What?"
Sirius shrugged, "It always works in the movies."
"And that kids," Remus gave the other three disapproving looks, "Is why we read books."
{===}
"Do you ever think about the insignificance of everything?"
Alex sat on a ridge, her back to the school, looking out over the Forbidden Forest. Her feet dangled over the gap beneath her, swinging freely. Sirius stared at her blankly. He had hurried down here, to see if she would mention the library, maybe what he had done wrong or what he could have done better. He did not expect an existential crisis.
"Like, okay. We exist." Alex stated obviously, "And out there there's so much more of everything than there is here. The stars! Think about the stars. There are more stars than there are grains of sand on Brighton Beach. That's a lot of everything. That's a lot of hydrogen, and a lot of energy, and radiation. And compared to space, the stars take up no room, just a tiny little corner of an eleven dimensional object that our brains can't even comprehend. And, like, if space is a shape, then there has to be something outside it. So think about how much everything there is out there. And then there's me, and there's you. And we're just..." she gestured to the ridge, "Here."
Sirius cocked his head.
"Makes you think, right?" Alex leaned back on her palms, tipping her head to the sky, "All this Voldemort stuff doesn't really matter, does it? It doesn't matter if we all die tomorrow, there'll still be an everything out there that makes our deaths look like grains of sand on the beaches of an atom on the beaches of a grain of sand on Brighton Beach. And there will be a person walking down that beach, and they'll step on Earth, on all of everyone, and they'll kill more people than Voldemort ever could, and animals and plants too, and they wont even realise. They'll just keep walking. Maybe they'll get a cup of tea, or visit their grandma."
This was exactly why Sirius didn't think, because thinking led to things like this. Big existential thoughts that made you question why you even get up in the morning.
"Yeah." Alex said, more quietly now, like she was reassuring herself of something, "It doesn't matter."
What the hell was going on inside Alex Fawley's mind? Was this what people said when they just blurted the things they thought with no concern for judgement? Maybe, Sirius thought, the darkest thing in some people was a monster, like in Voldemort, or his parents, or Sirius himself. Maybe for other people, it was this yawning chasm that was too terrifying to face the prospect of. The kind of dark where you can't see the bottom, just an endless abyss of black, like an inverted night sky.
Maybe Alex was affecting him. Maybe he thought too much.
Yeah. That was probably it.