A/N: You will probably be a little confused by the end of this chapter. Don’t worry, everything that doesn’t make sense in this chapter will be explained in the next one! I promise! ~ Trinsy
“You bloody idiot “!”
Jocelyn scrabbled at a loose board on the window of the tumbledown Shrieking Shack, ignoring Sirius’s curses. At last she got it to move aside.
“Shut up, and come on,” she sighed, turning back to her furious companion.
“Take this jinx off me right now!” Sirius demanded, referring to the Anti-Disapparation Jinx she had placed on him.
“I will as soon as we get in the Shack,” Jocelyn answered coolly.
“It’s impossible to Disapparate in the Shack,” Sirius snapped.
“Exactly,” Jocelyn nodded.
Sirius was becoming worked up again.
“Jocelyn, Bellatrix “!”
“Oh, honestly!” sighed Jocelyn, exasperated. “Can we please discuss the complexities of your warped psyche, which gives you this strange, emotional need to take revenge on various members of your family, inside!”
A giant black dog walked grudgingly over to the window. Jocelyn climbed onto its back and slithered through the hole. A moment later the dog leaped in after her. Jocelyn waved her wand at the window, moving the board back over it, then turned back to the dog, which had become Sirius again.
“Take the jinx off,” he ordered.
“Get in the tunnel,” Jocelyn commanded.
“You don’t trust me?”
“Honestly? No.”
“You see, this has been our problem from the beginning! This is what I was saying back in Toujours Pur “”
“Oh, don’t even get me started on Toujours Pur!” Jocelyn snapped, as they entered the tunnel leading back to the Hogwarts grounds. “You, Sirius the Wise, too wise to go in there, waltzing down like it’s the passage to Honeydukes “!”
“Well what about you, you swore you’d never go down there!”
“Oh yeah? Contre Ceux Toujours Purs!” she snapped, shaking the hand with the ring in front of his face. “Like I wasn’t going down there after that!”
“The ring was supposed to make you stay “!”
“Contre Ceux Toujours Purs was our pact! It meant sticking together, no matter what! And it meant disowning everything, including Toujours Pur!”
“Yeah, well I had to ignore parts of the pact to fulfill others,” Sirius growled.
“You had to ignore it to fulfill your stupid drive for revenge!”
“We just keep coming back to that, don’t we?”
“Of course we do, it’s the reason we’re here!”
“Oh honestly, Jocelyn!” he exploded, rounding on her. “Contre Ceux Toujours Purs! Do you even know what that means anymore?”
“‘Against Those Always Pure,’” she answered quietly, almost as though she were reciting from a textbook. “The antithesis of the Black family maxim. The motto of the ‘Black Sheep.’”
“Exactly! Against them! That was why I went there tonight!”
“You can be against them without marching straight to death! Look at Andromeda!”
“Andromeda has Ted; she has Nymphadora! She made her statement!”
“And running away wasn’t yours?”
“Yeah, well what was yours?” challenged Sirius, ignoring her question. “Disapparating before you could finish the job? Freeing Bella after she admitted to murdering your mum?”
“Oh, would dying have been a better statement?”
“No, but fighting! Really fighting!”
“You’ve never wanted me to fight!”
“No, but since you were there you might as well have taken out a couple Death Eaters! Instead you just stunned Bella “!”
“To save your life, and mine! All I wanted was to get out of there alive!”
“Yeah, well all I wanted “”
“Now we’re coming back to this stupid, stupid revenge thing! I’d rather have both you and Bella alive than both of you dead!”
“Didn’t seem to care so much about either of us these past couple of months,” noted Sirius bitterly.
Jocelyn flinched slightly.
“Well you weren’t very caring yourself, were you?” she whispered.
“Don’t turn the focus back to me!” Sirius snapped.
“All right, fine, I’ll admit it: I made a mistake, all right? I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was wrong.”
Sirius nodded slowly.
“Me as well,” he whispered finally. “But I’m not sure what the right path would have been like anymore.”
She gave a sad smile.
“Me either.”
“Maybe I should have stuck around …”
“Yeah. But maybe I should have been more supportive …”
“Yeah.”
They didn’t speak again until they reached the exit of the tunnel. Sirius pushed the knot that froze the Whomping Willow, and they climbed out. Neither were aware that a pair of hazel eyes had caught sight of the Willow’s sudden paralysis. The moment they were safely out of the tree’s shadow, Sirius turned to Jocelyn.
“What is that you want from me?” he questioned.
Jocelyn shook her head.
“I don’t know anymore, Sirius,” she said wearily.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “You know, you said you wanted “”
“You know what, Sirius,” Jocelyn interrupted, “it doesn’t really matter what I said I wanted, all right? Or what I needed, for that matter.”
“What did you need?” he questioned gently.
Jocelyn looked away from him, out across the Hogwarts grounds, smiling wryly.
“The same thing you needed from me, I guess,” she whispered. “Just being there for me.”
He nodded slowly.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “I was trying to keep you out of danger, though, you know. … Even if I didn’t do a very good job of it.”
“I know,” she murmured. “But the thing is Sirius “” she turned back to him “ “I would have felt safer if you’d just been with me in case they showed up. … Selfish, I know,” she added, looking away again.
And, at last, as he gazed at her turned figure silhouetted in the moonlight, Sirius overcame the struggle he’d been having with himself since Christmas.
“So all you needed,” he said in a low voice.
“Was you!” Jocelyn finished, turning, and now she and Sirius were staring unflinchingly into each other’s eyes. “But that was the one thing you never gave me,” she continued, making no effort to conceal the tears in her voice. “So I had to find someone who would. And I “”
“Jocelyn!” said Sirius sharply. He didn’t like where this conversation was going.
“And I did,” continued Jocelyn firmly, as though she hadn’t heard him. But she had dropped her eyes to her shoes now. She couldn’t look at Sirius, because if she did she knew she wouldn’t say it; and if she didn’t say it now, she never would; and it needed to be said. “I have Hector now,” she whispered, and winced.
There was a long silence. Finally, Jocelyn slowly lifted her eyes to Sirius’s face. He looked as though she had slapped him.
“And “ and what do I have?” he asked finally, trying to swallow the lump in his throat.
Jocelyn bit her lip.
“Oh Sirius,” she whispered, looking at him sadly. “You’ve always had “ and will always have “ my heart…. But you can’t have me!”
Sirius inhaled very sharply. There was a long pause.
“You made your choice,” she said finally, “a long time ago.”
“I made the wrong choice,” he said bitterly.
“Well I knew that,” she said, and gave him a sad smile.
They looked at each other for a long moment.
“Look, Sirius,” she said suddenly, and very quickly, “I’m sorry things didn’t “ didn’t work out the “ the way we thought “”
“Oh, Jocelyn,” he whispered, “I “ have always “ loved you.”
She nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks. They looked at each other for a moment that lasted an eternity. Sirius reached out his hand to “
“Sirius! Jocelyn! Thank Merlin you’re all right!” cried a voice to Sirius’s right. They both jumped, and in that moment they broke eye contact as Jocelyn looked toward the voice. A moment later Lily burst upon them, followed closely by James, Remus, and Hector. Sirius watched as Jocelyn embraced Lily, then turned to be wrapped in Hector’s arms. She looked at Sirius over Hector’s shoulder, and for the last time their eyes locked. She slowly, almost imperceptibly, shook her head, tears in her eyes. To anyone else it might have looked like she was fighting not to cry, but Sirius knew better. He knew exactly what that gesture meant.
No, Sirius, she was saying, sadly, gently, yet firmly as she always had. It’s over. We can’t go back. We can’t be what we could have been.
“Hey,” James’s voice shook Sirius out of his thoughts. “You okay?”
“What? “ I mean, yeah,” he said, trying to clear his head. He forced himself to look James in the eye. Past James he could see Hector leading Jocelyn away, his arm around her waist. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said quietly, his gaze going back to Jocelyn’s retreating figure. “Everything’s fine.”