Remus could hardly contain his astonishment on seeing the picture. It wasn’t just the people that were depicted there that amazed him, nor was it the fact that the individuals grouped within the frame could never have been depicted together in a photograph if it werent for magic. No, what really astonished Remus was the sight of Darcy. He remembered the last time he had seen a picture of Darcy as if it were yesterday. He stared at the pair of her and Sirius and memories long forgotten came flooding back to him.
Giving Dumbledore a brief nod, he rose from his chair and proceeded into the ward and to Harry’s bedside.
Sitting by Harry’s bedside, Remus continued to stare at the picture. While he, James and Lily were all about seventeen in the photo, he knew that Sirius must have been that little bit older as he hadn’t met Darcy until after he had finished his education at Hogwarts.
Remus thought back to the first time he had noticed anything amiss with his friend. Sirius had always been a ladies man. He was one of those lucky guys who were blessed with enough charm, and good looks that he did not have to try very hard, women simply found him attractive, just as he was.
It had always been that way right through their time at Hogwarts and had continued when they had left school and begun to train for their various jobs and work for the Order of the Phoenix.
Some time around then, Sirius had seemed to quieten down and grow up. To Remus and the others, he seemed to have matured. No longer was he interested in chatting up anything in a skirt. He seemed distracted and didn’t even seem to notice the looks he attracted from women wherever he went.
James and Remus had joked privately about his being in love, but dared not ask him directly. Sirius could have quite a temper at times, and was more an adept and getting his own back at people who annoyed him!
They assumed that because Sirius had never introduced or even mentioned any special girl, that it was something else that was bothering him. They all had more than enough to worry about with Voldemort and the Order as it was. And so Sirius’s friends had put down the change in their friend to growing up and maturing in the middle of a war.
More and more wizards and witches had died at the hands of the death eaters and everyone was edgy, wondering if they were to be next.
It was about this time that Sirius arrived back at the original Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix and requested a private conversation with Remus and James.
Almost as if it were yesterday, Remus recalled that conversation.
“Look, would you just stop pacing Padfoot, you’re making me dizzy,” James complained, watching his friend’s incessant tour of the cramped bedroom. James wasn’t annoyed at his friend. He was worried. Very worried. Sirius looked absolutely terrible. His face had a haunted, drawn look, like one who had seen too many horrors in life. He prowled around the confines of the tiny bedroom, like a wounded animal, carefully avoiding eye contact with his friends. Youth seemed to have fled from Sirius’s life overnight.
Remus, who was more practised in the art of patience than James, sat silently staring into the distance. He knew that Sirius would eventually tell them what was on his mind in his own good time, getting on his case would not speed up the process in any way. Sirius turned and stared at them both, and as though he had just come to an internal decision, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a small photograph and handed it to James.
James studied the picture carefully, letting out a slow whistle and beginning to smile as he handed it to Remus to look at it. Remus gazed at the beautiful girl with the long brunette hair smiling out at him. The Sirius that was in the picture, stood behind her, his arms wrapped protectively around her waist as he gazed almost defiantly out of the small magical photo.
Remus raised his head and looked at Sirius, waiting for an explanation. He could see that James was now smirking and was probably wondering what the big deal was about, but one look at Sirius confirmed that there was more to this than met the eye.
Sirius began to speak softly, almost afraid that someone outside the room might hear him. “Her name is Darcy and she is the woman that I love.”
He began to pace again, slower this time as he continued to talk. “We met quite by accident almost 10 months ago now. Darcy was caught in the crossfire during the capture of two death eaters not far from here. She wasn’t badly injured but was desperate to get away and hide, despite her injuries. She refused to let me take her to St. Mungo’s, instead begging me to find her somewhere to hide until she had recovered.
“I knew it went against my better judgement, but decided to relent and help her out. I found her a place, and spent the next few weeks bringing her food and potions there. Initially her injuries were slow to heal, but after three weeks, she was almost herself again.”
He smiled slowly in remembrance, “James, I know that you always claimed to have fallen in love with Lily at first sight, but I could never fathom what that might be like. I always reckoned it was more a turn of phrase rather than something that actually happened, but I can now admit I was wrong.
“Hard as it was to believe, I was smitten and there was no way out. I knew almost immediately that Darcy felt the same way, although she fought it, telling me that she didn’t feel anything for me and that I shouldn’t hold false hopes like that.” Sirius face darkened and his brow furrowed as he remembered the words she had used to spurn him.
“But by the time she had healed fully, she had admitted how she felt. I was never happier. Darcy, unfortunately was never unhappier.”
Remus and James looked at each other in confusion as Sirius continued. “Darcy had always been very secretive about her family. I had put it down to the war. We all try and protect those we love. I thought that it was her way of trying to protect them. She seemed to be torn. She loved me, but it was as if by loving me she was betraying something or someone else. Not only that but she refused to meet me anywhere in public, I wanted her to meet all of you, but she refused. It felt like we were doing something wrong, constantly creeping around, meeting in secret in the oddest of locations, but I didn’t care. I loved her, so did whatever was needed in order to be able to be with her.”
Sirius sank down on the bed opposite his friends. “I can’t say it was easy, and recently it was getting harder and harder. Finally we had this massive row a few days ago. She told me that we wouldn’t be able to see each other for a few weeks, that her family were getting suspicious as to where she was always slipping off to. As always, I lost my temper, accused her of being ashamed of me. She let me rant and rave and give out, without ever offering an explanation. When I had finished, she simply kissed me and left.”
Remus and James sat in silence, waiting for him to continue. They had never heard Sirius talk about a girl like this. That change that came over him was astounding.
Sirius sighed and slowly continued his story. “I didn’t see or hear from her for days. I was crazy with worry, wondering what had happened to her, wondering if she had been attacked.
“And then yesterday I got a owl asking me to meet her. I believed that she felt as sorry as I did for the row and wanted to make it up. Those days I had spent apart from her and not hearing from her had been hellish. I was prepared to apologise and do what I needed to do to make it work between us.
“She was waiting for me when I got there, I thought my heart would break when I saw her. Her face was badly bruised and she was hurt. She wouldn’t admit it of course, but I could tell by the way she moved that she had been beaten.” Sirius paused at this point, his head lowered as he tried to control his ragged breathing.
“I went crazy. Told her I would kill whoever had laid their hands on her, but she refused to tell me what had happened.
“She cried. She cried so hard I could hardly understand what she was saying at times.”
Sirius got up and started pacing again, his face haunted with pain, his two friends were no longer smiling, in fact Remus had that cold, icy feeling in the pit of his stomach, the one that you get when you realise you are about to hear something terrible, and there is nothing you can do to stop the inevitable news from being imparted.
“She told me again and again that she loved me. She talked about places we had gone, things we had done together. I wanted her to stop. It all sounded too final. After all, we had the rest of our lives to be reliving our time together didn’t we? And then she told me that we could never see each other again.
“Of course I wouldn’t believe her. How could I? I loved her, and knew she loved me. Surely we could work through it. But she just cried and shook her head.
“I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I demanded an explanation from her, which she wasn’t prepared to give. I lost my temper with her.”
Sirius’s voice was barely a whisper by now, but his friends caught every word, such was the silence in the bedroom.
“I told her that she must never have loved me, that it must all have been a lie, and then I turned to leave. I heard her call me back, but I wouldn’t listen.
“It was after midnight, and I wasn’t really paying attention where I was going. I was just wandering aimlessly from street to street tyring to make sense of what had happened. I know that was stupid, what with the war going on, but all I could think about was what she had just said.
“I was then I heard the sounds of footsteps following me.” James head snapped up on hearing this and he sat a little straighter on the bed. Sirius shook his head.
“It was a textbook ambush - darkened alley, one attacker behind, two in front. I started hexing everything in sight, all the while looking for escape routes. I managed to hold them off and headed down another passageway. I had stunned one of the attackers, and got another over my shoulder as I ran.”
“Then my luck started running out, I knew the third guy was gaining on me and seemed adept at dodging everything I threw at him. Before I knew what was happening, I heard him utter some curse that I have never even heard of. I didn’t have time to utter deflection spell, when I felt something ram into me and knock me sideways out of the path of the curse.
“All I could think of was my attacker. I turned from where I lay in the alley and got him with a full body bind. It was only then I realised that someone was lying in the alley, someone else who had taken the full brunt of that curse.
“I didn’t need to check. I needn’t have looked. In my heart I knew it was Darcy, even before I walked back to where she lay face down and turned her over,” Sirius whispered, his voice nothing more than a guttural moan. It was as if all life had gone out of him. He seemed to be barely keeping it together. His hands were joined, in an attempt to control his shaking hands, his knuckles white.
“She was still alive, but only just. She told me that her surname was Nott.” Remus and James exchanged glances. Sirius nodded, “Yes, Theodore Nott is a Death Eater, and her brother. She only survived long enough to tell me that she loved me, and that she was only trying to protect me when she tried to distance herself from me. Within moments, she was gone.”
Sirius stopped speaking. His friends sat in silence, staring at him with pity, anguish and shock. He shook his head, as if forcing himself to continue, “Darcy was my love. She was the woman that I would have done anything for. She was the woman I pictured myself growing old with, the only woman that filled my dreams and my hopes for the future. I couldn’t just let her die and not have you know that she existed. Look at her picture. I can swear to you now, that is the picture of the only woman I will ever love.”
Tears were slowly streaking down Sirius’s face. He raised a hand to James and Remus when they tried to approach him, he backed away slightly, placed his picture in his pocket and turned and left the room.
Sirius had changed that day. He was the first of them to have lost someone directly and it changed him. It seemed to kill off a little part of him. He seemed to lose part of who he was. Remus always felt it was that loss that had let him to believe that he couldn’t act as Secret Keeper to the Potters. He hadn’t been able to save Darcy, how could he trust himself to save his best friend and young family?
He had become even more reckless in some respects. Throwing himself into his work with wild abandon, relishing going up against Death Eaters regardless of how outnumbered he was. He seemed have some sort of desperate death wish. It had taken him a lot of time to accept Darcy’s death and return to a shadow of his former self, but he was never going to be the same Sirius that Lupin and James had known.
From that day on, Sirius had never spoken of Darcy. His friends had spoken of her, when he wasn’t present, wondering about the ten months they had spent together. But Sirius had never, ever mentioned her again. It became an unwritten rule between them.
Remus sighed, shaking himself from his reverie. True to his word, Sirius had never loved any other woman from then until his death. Remus had often wondered had that been a mistake. Death should only be the final chapter for the one who died, not for those left to carry on.
Remus began to understand why Dumbledore needed and wanted him to tell Harry about Darcy. Harry needed to learn to forgive himself, and to love again without fear of loss, if he ever wanted to become a whole person. He also needed him to see that Sirius was a flawed man just like any other who should have had the strength and courage to love again, but hadn’t.
Remus lowered himself into the chair by Harry’s bed and began his story. “Her name was Darcy, and she was the woman Sirius loved.”