Chapter 6: Not a Lot to Say
It was during the summer holiday, that Sirius found a solution to Remus’s ‘furry little problem’, as James had christened his lycanthropy. He was doing his Transfiguration homework, an essay about animagi. An idea hit him so hard he nearly fell off his seat. He grabbed his quill and wrote to James, explaining it at length. Then, he frantically began searching through his books, researching the ability to transform into an animal. The reply from James was written messily as though he had been in a hurry. The words ‘Bloody genius’ and suchlike, were mentioned a lot.
He wasn’t the only excited one. The whole Black family had something to be pleased about. Andromeda had married a man called Ted Tonks, and was ecstatic that she was soon going to be starting her own family, and was rid of her old one. She didn’t even mind when Sirius reported that she had been wiped off the tapestry. So most were glad that they were rid of a blood traitor, and his mother especially, delighted in looking over at him, and muttering things under her breath like, “One down ...” Regulus was finally going to join his brother at Hogwarts, and was determined to be in Slytherin, salvaging the family’s reputation since the ‘Gryffindor Incident’. Therefore, Mrs Black couldn’t wait to get her social life back on track, and Mr Black was happily anticipating his wife being in a better mood. Not that much of the family were nice to Sirius, in all this excitement. But he hadn’t expected them to be.
Still, he spent the rest of the holiday as he always did, writing to his friends, flying on his broom (low to the ground, to avoid being spotted), and doing homework. But now, he added extra research into the picture, which is something he never imagined he would do.
By the time they reached the King’s Cross, on September first, Sirius was getting very annoyed with his brother, who was asking him endless questions, and making snide remarks to cover up the fact that he was slightly in awe of his older brother, the way eleven year olds are.
“So ... How many people are there?” he asked, almost running to keep up with Sirius’s fast pace.
“A lot. You’d be surprised,” Sirius sighed.
“Yeah, and how many are your friends?” he laughed, checking to make sure his parents heard him. Sirius ignored his giggles, until Regulus calmed and asked, “How big is it?”
“Big,” was all Sirius could be bothered to reply.
“And how do you get sorted?” Regulus asked breathlessly.
“If I tell you, will you quit bugging me, and leave me alone?” Sirius asked, gritting his teeth.
“Yes!” Regulus nodded excitedly, then quickly added, “I mean “ fine, it’s boring talking to you, anyway.”
Sirius sighed again, and said in a bored voice, “You have to fight a dragon while wearing a green wig and an orange tutu, ok? Now shut the hell up!”
Regulus looked put out, but stayed silent. After a minute of this, however, he couldn’t contain himself and blurted out, “But I don’t have an orange tutu!” Sirius ignored him, glad to finally see platforms nine and ten. He slid nonchalantly through the barrier. He was soon joined by his brother, who had taken it at a run. “Wow!” he cried, “How did I do that? That was amazing!”
Sirius left him behind, in search of his friends. They were waiting for him in the end compartment, as always. Before any of them knew it, the train had left, and James was teaching them poker, a game his dad had shown him over the summer, intent on teaching his only son more of ‘life’s finer things.’
“Mum went mad when she found out,” he told them as he shuffled cards. “She said that as my father he shouldn’t be encouraging me to gamble at such a young age. So then he spent a week taking me to operas and orchestras to make up for it. My ears are still ringing.”
“Has he let you taste champagne yet?” Peter asked, watching James’s every move.
“No, Mum’s still drawing a very strong line there,” he replied, sadly.
“Well, you are a little young,” Remus pointed out. His friends stared at him.
“Remus, I fear you are inhuman,” Sirius told him, and he shrugged. They were about to start, when there was a knock on the compartment door. Lola, Lily and Tara entered.
“Hey guys, everywhere else is full. Mind if we stay with you?” Lola asked.
“Sure!” Sirius said, a little quickly. He had been writing to her all summer, but it was nice to be able to see her again, to hear her voice. He had missed her.
“Hey Lily!” James smiled. “How have you been?”
“Fine,” she told him, curtly. There was an awkward silence. Tara noticed the cards.
“Playing that Muggle game?” she asked. “Snap or something?”
“Poker,” Peter corrected her. She nodded, smiling.
“I can play poker!” Lola exclaimed, grinning. “Deal some cards my way!” she told James, who obliged.
“Lily?” He asked. She nodded, and took the cards he passed her. “What about you, Tara?”
“I’ll just watch,” she chirped, still smiling, happily.
It was a good game. Lola played well, but Lily shone through. Even James looked uncomfortable as the game progressed, and he had been confident that he would win. Hours passed with no one noticing, and then it was over. Luckily, they hadn’t been betting real money, or everyone would have owed Lily a hefty sum. She looked pleased with herself, and seemed to be having fun. They settled down to talk about their summers, and soon had arrived at Hogwarts. Sirius smiled.
“I can’t believe Lily won that poker game,” James said later, as the Marauders sat on their beds late that night. “She’s so amazing.”
“You still like her?” Remus asked. He was reading a book and talking to his friends at the same time, a talent that no one else could compete with.
James sighed, dreamily, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“Does hatred make the heart grow fonder too?” asked Sirius grinning. James threw a pillow at him, and he laughed.
“Lily doesn’t hate me,” James told him, stubbornly. Sirius rolled his eyes at Peter, who giggled, unbeknownst to James.
“Do you still like Lola, Sirius?” asked Remus, still reading the ridiculously thick book. Despite all they had seen at Hogwarts, the Marauders still marvelled at Remus’s ability to read and hold a perfectly normal conversation at the same time.
Sirius gulped. He liked Lola, a lot, but remembered how she had rejected him in their second year, and the number of times she had referred to him as being ‘like a brother’ in her letters over the summer. He could take a hint. It was time to move on, he thought. So instead of saying what he knew deep down was the truth, he said, “No. She’s nice, but you were right, Remus. Her being a seer could make things difficult. No, tomorrow, I plan on seeking someone new. That Tara girl’s ok. She’s pretty, a Gryffindor, sense of humour, not the brightest, but she makes up for it by being so damn nice!”
“Tara. Not a bad choice,” Peter nodded, trying to sound knowing.
“What about you, Petey? Got your eye on any girls?” Sirius asked, deliberately patronisingly, and winking.
“No! Girls are too soft. And they think I’m weird,” Peter mumbled. Sirius, James and Remus laughed.
The next day, Sirius swanned up to Tara, smiling his bright white teeth. “So, Tara, how are you this fine morning?”
She looked at him, an eyebrow raised. “Fine,” she said, cautiously. Sirius was still grinning. He looked over at Lola, and saw her watching him. He hated the way that she made him feel. She didn’t want to go out with him, he was sure of it. So why did he feel this way? She was still watching him. He tore his eyes away, back to Tara, and blurted out, “Do you want to go to the next Hogsmeade weekend?”
“Sure, I always go to Hogsmeade weekends,” Tara told him, laughing. But Sirius didn’t think she was mocking him.
“I mean, with me?” he asked. She stopped laughing. Her eyebrows furrowed. She was silent for a moment, and then she smiled.
“Sure!” She walked away, and sat down by Lola and Lily. They began talking quietly together. Sirius watched them. Lola looked up at him suddenly, and her eyes looked hurt. Sirius felt rotten, and turned away, in search of his fellow Marauders. But he could still feel her stare burning into his back.
Lily cornered Sirius after the bell went for lunch. “I want a word,” was all she said, as she dragged him into an empty classroom. James looked shocked at this, but Sirius just shrugged, and winked at him, which he knew would drive his friend crazy. He concealed a smile.
“What do you want?” he asked, and Lily frowned. She stepped closer.
In a low voice, she murmured, “I can’t stop Tara going out with you, but I just wanted you to know: You really hurt Lola today. You know she likes you.”
“No, she doesn’t,” Sirius assured her. “She refers to me as being like a brother. People don’t date their brothers,” he stated, with the air of a proud toddler who had just learnt to count up to ten. Lily was not impressed.
She rolled her eyes, “Haven’t you ever heard of denial? I just wanted to tell you, if you hurt either of them, you’ll find yourself with a rather nasty case of being on fire.”
Sirius gulped. She nodded, and brushed past him. He stood, thinking for a moment, then followed her out. He was absolutely certain she wasn’t bluffing. In the Great Hall, he sat between James and Tara. He felt uncomfortable. James was trying not to watch him, but failing, and grinding his teeth (but no one else noticed this), Tara was looking over at him and smiling, Lola was staring at him openly, and Lily was looking at him, in a way that made him feel she was almost daring him to mess up. Eventually, he got up and left.
Tara followed, “Sirius! Sirius!” he closed his eyes, and carried on. She grabbed the back of his robes, and he turned. “Sirius, didn’t you hear me?” she laughed, good naturedly.
“I heard,” was all he said. Her smile flickered.
“What do you mean?” she asked. Her blue eyes looked scared, and confused.
He sighed, and turned away, “Just ... just leave it, Tara.”
As he walked away, he heard her cry, “Sirius!” and he was sure she was about to cry. Once he had turned a corner, and was sure he was out of sight, he ran.
He was sitting on a window ledge in the Astronomy tower, staring at the stars. He had been named after stars “ Sirius was one of the brightest that could be seen from Earth, and Perseus was a constellation. He had no idea which ones they were, but sometimes, like then, he would pick one, and imagine it was his. He loved the stars “ whenever he had been bullied by his family, he liked to lose himself in them. In London, of course, he couldn’t see many, but here the sky was full. It was breathtaking. He heard someone come in behind him.
“Sirius,” the person said, softly. He could tell it was Lola. She came up to him, and stood beside him, until he turned his face towards her. As soon as his grey eyes met her dark ones, she slapped him. He was completely shocked. “I don’t believe you! What were you thinking?” she spat at him.
“I “ what? When?” he stuttered, lost.
“When you asked out my friend, crushing my spirit, and then ripped her own heart out hours afterwards!” she screamed. There were pink spots on her cheeks, and he couldn’t remember her looking like this before.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, bewildered. “How could I crush your spirit? You were the one who rejected me in second year!”
“I said to give it a couple of years! Because I knew that if we went out then, it wouldn’t work out! I knew we had to wait!”
“How? How did you know?”
“I don’t know!” she screeched. “The same way I know most things, I suppose! The reason that I’m top of our Divination class! Because I just, know!”
“Wait,” he held up his hand, “you mean that you really do like me?”
“Of course I do!” she yelled at him. Her voice caught, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them, she spoke more softly, and said, “But I don’t know why. You really hurt Tara, you know.”
“I didn’t mean to,” was all he said. He could feel his world crumbling.
“You know what? Screw you. I was stupid. We could never work. I don’t know why I bothered. I guess you being an asshole turned out to be a premonition that I missed. Just go.” But as he began to leave, she put her arm across the doorway, blocking his exit. “However, for some reason, I think Tara really likes you. So I want you to apologise.”
He nodded, and she let him leave. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard a choking sob, as if she was trying not to cry, but it had come anyway. More than anything he wanted to run back upstairs, and hold on to her, but instead he walked back to the dorm, in a daze.
After that, he and Tara went back out, and he mentioned neither his meeting with Lily or Lola. He wasn’t on speaking terms with either of them, which caused a lot of awkwardness.
Still, he distracted himself by keeping busy. He practised hard at Quidditch, taunted Snape with the rest of the Marauders, and researched animagi. Not that they were getting very far. As much as they tried to find out the key to turning into an animal, they just couldn’t.
“We need to get into the restricted section,” James thought aloud, after they were once again thrown out of the Library for ‘suspicious behaviour’, meaning they were there for over an hour and had been sitting quietly while reading the dusty old books.
Sirius rolled his eyes, “Sure James, you do that, and me and these two will stand and watch as you get detention for the rest of your life. Pincer just doesn’t trust us, even if we did manage to get a note from a Professor. Which in itself is a technical impossibility.”
“No, I think there’s another way!” James protested, “Follow me!”
Sirius, Remus and Peter looked at each other dubiously. Sirius shrugged and began to follow James, who was practically running to the Common Room. The four of them ascended the staircase until they came to the fourth year boys dormitory. James dived to his trunk he pulled something out, and in a flash of material “ he was gone. Peter screamed in a manner that should really have earned him a weeks worth of taunting, at the very least. But Sirius barely heard him.
“James? Where did you go? You idiot, what on Earth did you do?” he yelled.
Remus, however, didn’t seem scared. He raised an eyebrow, and smiled knowingly. “Well, well, where did you get that then?” he asked.
“What? What has he got, Remus?” Sirius asked, his voice bordering on hysterical. His best friend, after all, had just vanished into thin air.
“He’s got himself an invisibility cloak. You kept that quiet, didn’t you?”
James’s head appeared. It was grinning. Peter screamed again.
“One has to wait for the opportune moment,” James said. “My Dad has one already, but he was given this as a present. Since he didn’t need it, he gave it to me on the last day of the summer holidays.” Sirius was a lot calmer, now that he knew what was going on.
“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” he demanded.
“Never mind that. Just get under here with me, and we’ll go to the Library.”
They went, and although it was awkward with the four of them, they still managed to get there in the end. They began to look across the shelves, searching for anything that could help them.
“Remember,” Remus whispered, “don’t open any books until we get back to the Dorm. Who knows what could happen? Just shove them up your robes or something, ok?”
“Stop nagging, we know. It’s not like you haven’t old us ten thousand times,” Sirius muttered, taking a book of the shelf and concealing it away.
“Come on,” James said, turning to leave, “we don’t want too many to go missing. Pincer probably does an inspection every morning to check that everything’s still in perfect order.”
So, as quietly as four teenage boys can be, they sneaked back to their dorm. Once they were there, they spread the stolen books on the floor, and stared down at them, in awe. James, reached down to open one, but Remus stopped him, and pointed his wand at the book.
“Silencio! You can never be too sure,” he muttered.
“Good thinking,” Peter squeaked. The four boys settled down, cross legged on the floor, and began to read.
And that is how the rest of the year passed by. Nothing particularly spectacular happened. The Marauders researched animagi and, of course, caused mayhem when they weren’t. Sirius and James practised Quidditch like their whole being depended on it, and Sirius went on most Hogsmead weekends with Tara, both quite content. She was, really, a lovely girl, and he enjoyed spending time with her. And any time a certain brunette floated to his mind, he pushed the image away. He was happy enough, for now.
During the last week, James made a discovery. He found how to become an Animagus in a dusty old book they had “borrowed” from the restricted section. First was a spell you performed on yourself, then you had to meditate for exactly a minute, and then down a potion. It was all very difficult looking, but the Marauders were not deterred, and swore to research the spell and potion more accurately over the summer.
And suddenly, without any kind of warning, they were going home. James was talking about the Quidditch final, and how he had scored almost all of the goals, the Ravenclaw Keeper completely oblivious as to how he could get past him every time. He was ignored by everyone but an adoring Peter, as Remus was reading avidly, and Sirius was staring out of the window, unusually quiet. His friends had no idea just how much he dreaded this journey each year, and he didn’t think they ever would. He contemplated going home to live with James, but decided against it. He wouldn’t “ couldn’t “ intrude upon his friend’s family. No, he would just hold his head up high and bear it. He was a Gryffindor. He was a Marauder. And, as much as he resented it, he was a Black.
AN: Ok, I know it seems really harsh Sirius going out with Tara when he likes Lola, but I think it has been established before now, that Sirius is in no way perfect. And I think my ages with Andromeda etc are all contradicting themselves at the moment, but really, this isn’t a novel that has to be 100% accurate. Just enjoy the story. Please review!