Chapter Text
“Come on, you can do better than that!”
Sirius had only meant to keep his cousin’s undivided attention for a moment. Long enough that Harry could collect the other children and flee elsewhere—but like many events in his sad, pathetic little excuse for a life, this one also refused to go to plan.
Bella’s once-beautiful face twisted into sneer, filled to the brim with the obvious extent of her hatred for him and everything he stood for, and though he’d somehow managed to deflect or outright dodge the vast majority of her chaotic spellwork while traipsing across the room in their dance of sudden death, it would seem that not even he was capable of the impossible for extended periods without the occasional slip-up.
Especially when roughly a quarter of his attention had been diverted to the place just up the stairs and to his right. Toward James and Lily’s son scrambling to get the Longbottom boy to safety mostly to no avail.
Funny that his greatest strength would also end up his undoing after all the many instances he’d scraped by in the past through sheer pigheaded luck. Never let it be said that his very existence hadn’t been tempting fate to strike him down from the moment he took his first rebellious breath all the way through until his tragic last.
The next abrupt explosion of red missed its mark when he ducked below the jet with ease, but upon popping back up to resume their little standoff, the following rapid-fire shot hit him square in the chest like a battering ram to the solar plexus—only that might have actually hurt a bit less than being the current person on the receiving-end of the full scope of the crazed woman’s ire.
Dark eyes flashed at him in renewed triumph, the curve of her manic mouth stretching into an even harsher facsimile of untold glee at finally besting him after countless years of trial and error. And Sirius was stuck with whatever idiotic expression had managed to ripple across his face milliseconds before the effects of the spell took hold and he became incapable of stopping the inevitable while falling backward to his untimely demise in laughably slow motion.
Perhaps if he had positioned himself somewhere a tad less dangerous overall. Maybe then he could’ve dusted himself off after the body bind had finally run its course and apologized to his lover for once again being a reckless old sod.
Death didn’t feel much like he expected. For one thing, it didn’t exactly feel like anything at all.
Not that he’d been hoping for the same level of excruciating torment as some of the other mishaps that had already plagued him throughout his lifetime. Godrick knows there’d been plenty enough mental and physical abuse sprinkled in with the other moments of abject misery from a tender age with a mother like Walburga at the helm, and that said nothing of his extended stint through Azkaban and the several months it took to recover from the worst of his injuries and actually piece his shattered psyche back together once more.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d always anticipated taking one of the unforgivables to the grave if he succumbed to anything that wasn’t his own self-inflicted stupidity getting the better of him. Although, one could argue taunting his crazed cousin with several less-than-subtle jabs at her ability to hit even a static target all while standing with his back to the veil archway more or less denoted that very thing.
It may not have caused him any tangible pain to slip through the door to the afterlife and beyond, but it was definitely colder and thicker than he felt inherently necessary for anything that wasn’t simultaneously being submerged into a vat of half-frozen jello. Minus the terrifying suffocation aspect, because though he doubted his lungs were actively drawing oxygen inside of them any longer, there also wasn’t quite the sort of pressure or really even anything resembling frenzied panic to speak of after the initial shock wore off.
Just calm, weightless, infinite cold surrounding him on all sides. Like a vast ocean of endless nothingness. Rocking his body in its soothing lullaby as it dragged him along to places similarly unknown at a steadfast, albeit leisurely pace.
That would be when the slideshow of renewed misery clicked on. Every last moment he’d ever lived through flickering past his seemingly closed eyelids one after the next. Starting from the inception of his birth with strange fuzzy blobs and a scowl he wouldn’t soon forget, speeding up to accommodate his early childhood and then golden years without a care for which parts he wished to linger on a tiny bit longer and thankfully zipping through those he would sooner obliviate entirely.
The one salvation he had was that it was nothing like the Dementors had done to him.
Those dark memories had been plucked out by sheer force and made to loop for what felt like an eternity and then some, whichever pieces held the most agony at their core berating him incessantly until he was left gasping for air and seizing on the hard stone floors of his dank little cell, riding wave after wave of aftershock until such a time as it repeated all over again the next day-hour-minute as punishment for his failures.
When it reached that same point in time, he was grateful for the gaps blinking in and out of existence at a stunningly erratic pace. Probably because his brain couldn’t quite recall much outside of those horrible encounters that wasn’t painfully dull and tedious. Scarfing down a quick meal when it wasn’t outright soggy or rife with mould. Sneaking a look at the paper every now and then to catalog the decade plus that had slipped by without his consent. Flinching at the telltale sound of fresh wailing coming from the surrounding cellblock that signaled he was soon to join the others in the newest bout of unholy torment.
And then it was over, and he was back to the small glimmer of a secondary life he’d barely gotten to enjoy in sporadic bursts here and there that were ultimately snuffed out about as quickly as they’d truly begun.
That should have been the end of the tape. Cut scene, roll credits. After all, it was his own eternal ending, so to speak, and thus nothing more should have followed after he saw the same flash of satisfaction flitter over his cousin’s face and heard the exact moment all ambient noise around him switched off like the swinging of a scythe as the veil sucked him in greedily never again to resurface.
It should have been, but it wasn’t. And if anyone had asked him whether or not he wanted to watch the shitstorm of heartache that followed his grand exit, Sirius would have told them exactly where they could shove the whole of the unnecessary procession and instead expedite him on to whatever bullshit came next.
There was probably a reason for it. Other than causing him the added torment of knowing just how terribly his loved ones mourned his loss—beginning with watching Harry attempt to chase after him to the same grim fate, and seeing the devastated acceptance wash over Remus’ far-too-pallid features as he gripped the boy from behind and confided that it was already much too late for frantic acts of useless heroism.
The screams were probably the worst part. Listening to the terror and grief rip out of his Godson’s throat on numerous occasions, even as it morphed from denial to crushing acceptance to something akin to venomous rage, the boy in turn lashing out at those around him for several weeks in the aftermath as if he alone bore the brunt of the burden of that conclusion because neither one of them had ever confided that their relationship was so much more than a simple friendship.
In hindsight, that had been a terrible mistake. Not only as it left his lover stumbling through the condolences sent his way for losing yet another childhood confidant, but for the fact he alone could have shared a small piece of their mutual hardship to help lighten the load for the both of them.
Months passed, and the hurts all lessened with time. Never quite as close to the surface as they’d been navigating through the initial hiccup, and for that, he was enterally grateful.
Harry continued pushing forward with the same brave stature his father once possessed, and Remus succumbed to new love blossoming in his heart despite the initial insistence he’d never find a way to get over Sirius’ death.
The tides all turned. Dumbledore met his end in an unlikely manner, and the beginning of the end of the second wizarding war flashed through his mind’s eye almost as if he was participating in its comeuppance side-by-side with those whose faces grew more and more grave by the minute.
On and on the images went, through searches for horcruxes with their surprisingly limited methods of destruction, to moments of shared joy never quite lengthy enough to have anyone feeling wholly satisfied by the time they finally slipped into the next perilous task.
It wasn’t until he watched the battle of Hogwarts reach a stunning and thoroughly gut-wrenching conclusion that Sirius remembered he was more than just an unlikely observer to the events going on around him. He was as much a part of them as he’d ever been, and it made him rightfully furious to know that Remus hardly got another shot at true happiness before it was ripped straight out of his fingers for good.
Just like James and Lily, his and Tonk’s infant son would never know more than that his parents wanted to fight for a future free from evil, and had died trying to make that dream more than a fleeting reality. Just like Harry, the boy would have to trek through life with only the shadow of that incomprehensible love cloaking his shoulders, listening to the stories of things he’d never get to witness with his own two eyes, yet feeling the loss of it all the same.
It wasn’t fair. None of it. Not a single bloody aspect of it was fair for those both living and deceased.
If he could, he’d reach his hands into those images and force them to behave differently. To accept an alternative outcome that wasn’t stained in the blood of his most precious loved ones and damp with thousands of their unshed tears.
Maybe life wasn’t supposed to be free from struggle entirely. Not everything had to be sunshine and rainbows without a stormcloud in sight, but it sure as shite could at least attempt being something better than the lot they’d all drawn, even as far back as the evening Peter chose betrayal over the love of his schoolyard friendships. Further still, if it could potentially bypass the whole ordeal and seek a more satisfying denouement that saw smiles on all of their faces instead of the heartbreak felt all around.
It didn’t matter that the end of the tunnel saw them all meeting the same swift fate eventually. For the few short decades they were privileged to walk the earth hand-in-hand with one another, it should have been done with laughter in their hearts and love seeping through the cracks spanning outward into infinity. Even if it called for a single sacrifice to see it to fruition. Even if he never got to join them for that final, joyous waltz of a brand new adventure. It would be worth it and then some knowing they stood a chance at finding it themselves. Together this time.
Lost as he was in the midst of his righteous anger, Sirius didn’t notice that he’d stopped traveling in a relatively forward-progressing direction and had instead begun spiraling back toward the darkness he’d only recently left behind, the images looping in a similar fashion as if rewinding the present so that it never truly existed in the first place.
Falling was damn near identical to floating, if you thought about it. One of the two just so happened to end in the abrupt spasm of every last iota of his being when he finally slammed back into the solid mass of his own consciousness with enough force to knock the air out of his suddenly very much working-as-they-should-be lungs.
So much for the painless aspect of the situation. Bella’s spell had been rather forceful, at the time of its inception, but not even he anticipated it could follow him through to the afterlife with enough vehemence as to offer one last suckerpunch straight to the chest.
His cousin really was a horrible, nasty little witch, wasn’t she?
Clutching at the area in question, he sucked in another gasping breath and tried his hardest not to keel over into what appeared to be a pan of sizzling bacon on a vaguely familiar stove, the entire center of his world tilting on its axis for a solid beat before it, too, fell back into place and the sensation ebbed into a dull whisper running gentle fingers over his racing thoughts.
It was only then that he noticed the spatula gripped tightly in his opposite hand. Though how he’d managed to blank that he’d been in the middle of cooking was honestly less of a mystery than it should have been.
Ever since the Dementors scrambled his brain every which way, he had occasional episodes of forgetfulness and periods of lost time that often felt concerning once he was free to question his motivations on the opposite side of the equation. Rarely so dangerous as attempting to cook and blacking out in the process, but hey. There was a first time for everything.
That he was also standing in the kitchen of his old flat sporting a pair of loose boxers and a threadbare black tee didn’t quite set the alarm bells ringing as they maybe should have. Nor did he even question anything was amiss until the sound of quiet footsteps approaching from behind found him glancing over his shoulder in time to watch a literal angel shuffle into the room, the person in question too engrossed in whatever they were reading to notice the way his jaw was on the floor while his heart hammered away somewhere in the vicinity of his steadily clogging throat.
Because it was Remus. The same as he remembered him to be at the peak of his loveliness even as time never managed to fully steal away the handsome quality of his stunning visage.
The very one who haunted many of the fragmented memories he’d clung to in order to undo the worst of the effects from his time wasting away in Azkaban. Unscarred and breathtaking in one of his ridiculous over-sized jumpers sporting its hastily-stitched holes near the collar that were once again beginning to unravel from overuse. Young and alive and so, so exquisite to look at.
“You’ll never guess what I found in the help-wanted ads this go around,” Remus said without ever once tearing his gaze away from the post in front of him, amber eye scanning what remained of the page in quick sweeps that should have been impossible to glean even an ounce of information from were he anyone in the entire universe other than exactly himself.
Sirius didn’t know he was moving until he had the scent of ginger tea and dried ink flooding his airways with its soothing comfort—and then it took everything left in his willpower not to bury his face down in a too-warm neck and sob uncontrollably at the fact they’d both somehow made it to the same place despite the length of time he knew had to have passed between their respective deaths what felt like only seconds prior.
The urge to apologize for everything he’d put his lover through in his absence pooled on the tip of his tongue, but he held it back. Content in the moment to simply relish in the sensation of Remus’ solid mass; and Remus’ heady scent; and Remus’ overbearing warmth; and Remus, Remus, Remus, Remus, Remus.
If it wouldn’t be horribly out of line to initiate their reunion with a smattering of thankful kisses peppered all over the other’s cheeks, nose, and mouth, he may very well have done just that. Bugger decorum, who needed respectable boundaries when the rightness of their proximity set his soul ablaze once more?
The fact that Tonks was likely somewhere close by waiting for her own tear-filled hello was perhaps the only reason he kept a tight lid on his enthusiasm while attempting to meld their persons into a single solitary unit.
Should his second cousin admonish him for his overt clinginess, he’d simply remind her that he was there for sixteen years prior to her swooping in and laying her claim, and just because the two had a child together and had gotten married in one lifetime after he was no longer alive to protest it didn’t mean the afterlife was any place to go throwing his loss in his face while it still felt fresh enough to wound him indefinitely.
The longer he held on with back-breaking urgency, the more it became apparent that he was missing something huge in terms of where exactly they stood on the whole missing one another aspect, however. Less because he was being actively shoved away or anything close to dismissed for his sudden disregard of personal space, and more for the fact the body clutched tightly in his arms had gone ramrod straight and hadn’t even returned the gesture in the slightest where his own dangling arms were concerned.
Pulling back just enough to skip his gaze over a pair of too-wide amber eyes, Sirius frowned at the expression he found slapped over his ex-lover’s ridiculously cherubic face.
If it weren’t for the ruddy quality of his complexion, he’d think the look borderline queasy at first glance. Remus appeared about as close to losing whatever meager breakfast he’d managed to scrounge up for himself as he’d ever seen him—and that was saying a helluva lot considering they’d shared close quarters with one another roughly an equal amount of time as they’d been something more than friends.
Nothing about the situation added up in the slightest. Not the initial reaction, and certainly not the gnawing pit in his stomach telling him he’d somehow buggered another thing beyond all recognition by forcing his too-big feelings someplace they didn’t quite belong.
What was he? Sixteen and stupid all over again? And here he thought he’d done away with those types of growing pains along with the rest of the uncertainty and doubt.
That didn’t stop the little voice in the back of his mind from screaming that he was breaking something precious he’d never again be able to fix. Or that it shouldn’t be so shocking to find their bodies pressed against one another even if the other had finally managed to move on from their failure of a courtship and was in love with someone better.
The last he could recall feeling similarly flayed wide open, they’d both been fresh-faced adults navigating the strangeness of their ever-changing relationship in that very loft apartment. Even then, he’d never seen anything so tense come out of one of their shared interactions. Not that wasn’t simultaneously his horrible excuse for a first kiss.
Almost as if they’d never embraced for an extended period of time without some kind of warning predating the action.
A right silly notion, taking into account the sheer number of years they’d been together intimately in some fashion. Still, if Sirius didn’t know any better, he’d think Remus a blushing virgin once more for all the tentative response eked out of a moment that should have been at least a tiny bit reciprocated in kind.
Unless, of course, he’d been wrong from the start about everything between them… although that really didn’t explain the enthusiastic attempt to give it the old college try, nor the innumerable instances he’d heard the total conviction lacing a sleep-soft voice as it spoke the words into his skin as a return favor for the times he had done much the very same thing.
Which brought up another strange inconsistency to the forefront of his thoughts. Why had their conversation begun entirely out of left field? Something to do with… help-wanted ads? That couldn’t be right. So why did it all sound so achingly familiar?
Sparing a quick glance down at the paper still clutched firmly in the other's hand, it was all he could do not to rip it out of his slackened grip and demand to know what the hell was going on.
The date alone at the top of the page left his mind dizzy with possibility, but it was the messy circles scratched around several notable listings that sent him reeling from the memory of a similar scenario in which he’d been in that very spot at the kitchen when his roommate had wandered in uttering nearly the exact same basic sentiment in regard to a series of job opportunities he’d found that might or might not end up proving prosperous for his future employment.
In other words, he wasn’t only remembering a slightly strange version of the current events from a place somewhere deep inside his brain. Sirius may very well be reliving those moments as if for the first time. And not that it made any sense in the slightest how that had come to pass, either, but if he was correct in the assumption Remus didn’t recall anything about their shared life together, he was as good as assaulting his poor friend in the middle of their kitchen without rhyme or reason other than that he was a terribly transparent sod taking advantage of the other’s far more innocent affections.
Releasing his hold not even a full beat later, he tugged what could only be described as the most sheepish of smiles onto his mouth in the hope it would erase some of the dazed astonishment being directed his way, opting to brush the whole thing off as nothing more than what it actually was. A complete and utter misunderstanding.
“Sorry,” he replied far too belatedly to feel wholly genuine, lacing his arms behind his back if only to keep them from wandering anyplace even more untoward in their habitual exploration of his ex-lover’s lithe and supple form.
You’d think he’d somehow forgotten how to act the part of the begrudging gentleman. What had it been? Sixteen years since their first life-changing kiss in that very room? In his mind’s eye, only a handful of hours had passed from their last tentative goodbye stolen moments prior to when they’d broken down those large doors to rescue Harry and the other foolish children from the Death Eaters seeking to incapacitate them by any means necessary.
Flicking his gaze to the side, Sirius used those same horrible emotions to dredge up some semblance of the nightmarish panic sinking deep into his bones. “I guess I’m still reeling from the latest installment of nonsense my sleep-addled brain decided to cook up when I least expect it. You were saying? About the job postings?”
“Oh, yes,” Remus agreed, blinking a few extra times in quick succession as his own synapses slowly but surely began firing off as previously intended until he no doubt realized the paper still clutched in his hand was the entire point of the conversation prior to their abrupt derailing. Holding it aloft, his smile became somewhat shier in its execution. “There’s a bookstore looking for some part-time help, is all. I just thought it worth the mention, seeing as you used to love to insinuate that books would one day become my achilles heel.”
“I believe what I actually told you is that they were your biggest strength and you should definitely replace Pince one day for all you know more than that old bat ever could,” he recounted, frowning inwardly to himself about where in Godric’s name the knowledge had resurfaced from after nearly a decade-and-a-half of far more pertinent information taking precedence over whatever nonsense his childhood self used to occupy his general musings with.
Not that Remus hadn’t then moved to the top of his priority list pretty much unanimously after he’d nearly buggered their friendship for good. There wasn’t a single useless factoid he could amass about their lifetime of conversations and offhand quips that was ever going to be a waste, in his opinion. Even the silliest ones held as far back as their Second year.
It was simply easy to forget that many of their past encounters used to set his nerve-endings vibrating out of control at the first signs of new awkwardness cropping up between them once they were finally settled and contented in their overall dynamic. Not to mention far more focused on the myriad ways in which they might die or worse in the coming unforeseen hardships plaguing their world left and right.
If the flash of satisfaction he caught in amber eyes was anything to go by, the other hadn’t anticipated the correction, but was no less pleased with its utterance despite that. Folding the page carefully once more, he stuffed it down into his side bag and gestured off toward the fridge. “I’ll be out the better part of the afternoon following up on a few in-person meetings with some potential employers. If there’s anything you’d like for me to grab while I’m already running my errands?”
“We’re out of eggs,” Sirius blurted, once again perplexed by his innate ability to solidify what used to be yawning gaps in his memory with little more than a fleeting whim and a tentative case of perpetual word-vomit.
Almost as if his mouth refused to allow the chance he’d stutter for long on any one subject and instead supplied him with a direct answer that should have been impossible and yet strangely wasn’t.
Because at that moment, there was zero doubt in his mind that opening the fridge door would result in his finding the shelves barren of all save a half-used litre of milk and a couple heels of staling bread. The fact he’d need those very eggs if he ever hoped to turn the other ingredients into anything close to resembling french toast had been pinging around in his thoughts while he fried the last of the bacon as a secondary consolation prize. But how could he know all that when only minutes prior to his arrival he’d been in the Department of Mysteries fighting Death Eaters and falling into the veil?
It didn’t make any sense.
Something about the situation definitely wasn’t adding up, but as Remus frowned at the sharp note of panic slipping into his tone toward the end of the admission, what had become increasingly more clear to him was that he needed to put a damper on his momentary freak-out if he didn’t want to find himself on the receiving end of an even bigger potential problem. Letting his poor roommate in on the fact he was both wholly, authentically himself and decidedly nothing close to the person—or persons—he’d been upon waking that morning. If he ever could be again.
“Okay,” the other said, taking a step backward while maintaining vaguely intense levels of direct eye contact. “I can pick some up on my way home. Any thoughts on dinner?”
“Hows about we skip the headache altogether and just do takeaway from that Chinese restaurant down the street you’ve recently become fond of,” Sirius replied with a somewhat more convincing quirk of the lips, doing his best to stuff the screaming wrongness into the far recesses of his brain until such a time as he could take it back out and reinspect it with a far more critical gaze.
That they had gone and eaten that very same thing once upon a time in a vaguely similar scenario only after deliberating for a solid twenty-or-so minutes about what was an appropriate meal to have to mark the momentous occasion flared up almost immediately the instant the words had spilled past his lips, but by that point, it was already far too late to stuff them down where they rightfully belonged.
Not that he’d meant to commandeer the suggestion and claim it as his own. It was only by happenstance that he even remembered an entirely different conversation having taken place when it resulted in the boy practically lighting up over his uncanny ability to play the role of the illustrious mind reader by hitting the exact nail on its head in a single go.
As if things could ever be that painfully simple.
“I’ll add it to the list,” Remus informed him with a softened smile and gentle wave of farewell.
No sooner had he vacated the area, the scent of something burning caught his sensitive nose with its acrid curl of wrongness, realizing far too late that he was still clinging to the spatula for dear life and had thoroughly buggered the last chance he’d get at a proper meal for several hours more.
Heaving a sigh out through clenched teeth, Sirius dumped the entire mess into the sink with the intention to do something about it when his head no longer felt like it was splitting clean in two and opted instead to go get dressed in something that wasn’t the equivalent of his twenty-year-old self’s typical night clothes. Preferably something with a few extra layers involved, though he figured the chill creeping down his spine might very well be one he wouldn’t soon shake.
The first step to figuring things out was to assess whether or not he was actively experiencing a horrifying case of perpetual deja vu, or if there wasn’t a more logical, alternative explanation to help him sort through the mess that was far too much information assaulting his mind attempting to drown him in a slew of frighteningly accurate ‘memories’.
Because one thing, if nothing else, was undoubtedly certain. No matter what life threw at him from any seemingly absurd angle, he was still first and foremost Sirius Orion Black. Research might not have been his forte back in his schoolyard days, but running from the long arm of the law spending weeks with no one else to talk to certainly helped at least one of ‘him’ develop a knack for the subject. And a penchant for sniffing out the truth.
Who knows, maybe it would all end up being something wildly entertaining. Like his becoming a medium who had accidentally transplanted an alternate universe’s version of himself’s ghost into his own consciousness for a brief period, and once the side effects wore off, everything would ebb back into the ambient hum of lesser worries he typically carried around the more he verified his actual life to be an entirely different story from the one begging him not to replicate it.
Blind optimism couldn’t hurt to try out in the meantime. He’d need a healthy dose of it anyway, should he find the answer wasn’t nearly as cut-and-dry as he hoped.
Grabbing his leather off the hook near the front door when he was finished changing into something a tad more appropriate for the bizarre situation, he slipped his feet into a familiar pair of well-worn combat boots without so much as bothering to lace the ties and Apparated off to discover whatever there was available to discover about a certain veil archway and its connection to the other side.
The research project didn’t get him very far.
Apparently, the Department of Mysteries had been aptly named due to the enigmatic nature of the objects housed within its hallowed walls. The Death Chamber even more so than the rest of it. Whatever information the Unspeakables had obtained over the long years about a certain peculiar archway existing in the room’s centre since time immemorial had been kept under tight lock and key—if there was anything of merit to discern other than what he already knew from his ‘memories’ of it.
Not even Padfoot would be useful in helping him glean a bit more without accidentally rousing the entire Ministry’s suspicions when a dog was seen flouncing through the area noticeably unattended. The trail he thought he might be able to follow had gone cold before it ever managed to take off.
Some great detective he sure turned out to be.
Thankfully, it didn’t matter all that much. Sirius only had that afternoon free to browse the Order-approved sections of the Aurors' Archives before he was summoned for another round of errands running messages for Dumbledore and back on his regularly scheduled patrol with his usual partner Dearborn. Hardly his idea of a good time, but at least it got him out of the house and his mind racing through the endless possibilities of what to do about his newfound curse.
Because at its core, that’s what it chalked up to be. A burden thrust upon his shoulders that was difficult to discern its full validity other than that he had an absurd amount of echoing conversations pinging around his brain anytime someone made an offhand comment about the weather in London or something equally benign, and he was forced into another session of accidental word-vomit to keep the proceedings moving along in much the same replicated manner as had ‘already’ transpired.
Of course, he wasn’t entirely a mindless puppet at the mercy of fate’s cruel whims. Same as that morning where he initially discovered the conundrum of living a life that had been twisted into one big cosmic joke, on the few occasions someone asked him a question and he wasn’t lost in his head carefully picking through the wealth of strange information stored up there, he found himself perfectly capable of saying or doing the exact opposite sentiment in regard to whatever he pleased. No holds barred.
The image in his mind’s eye never shuddered or rippled into a renewed version that fit that abrupt change in narrative—but if anything, it felt a little easier discovering there were still opportunities for new content to enter along with the near-perfect replica stealing whatever joy was possible out of experiencing his youth for the very first time. And that was better than the alternative of being shackled to his future misery with little hope for escape. At least he could still have a bit of fun on the way down.
In fact, the more settled Sirius became in the notion that whatever was happening to him wasn’t soon to abate no matter how sorely he wished it, the more an idea formed to help him take back the reins for good. Starting with tiny discrepancies sprinkled here and there to test the hypothesis that he was capable of doing something more than simply going through the motions indefinitely.
Though the overlap almost always narrowed back into a singular line of continuation, the things he said or did that were outlier still remained a constant of their own driving force. Deciding to blurt to Dorcas Meadowes that she had a fat arse at the end of one of their Order meetings added a layer of annoyance to their mandatory encounters that gave him unparalleled euphoria whenever he caught the disparity between her voice echoing in his head and the one snippily informing him of his latest assignment in such a manner that it vibrated with the sentiment to go fuck himself afterward.
It didn’t matter that he had been incised into the action by his own frustration with the constant sameness all around. Nor that he didn’t actually think it true. The part that mattered was that it stuck long enough to spice things up in the midst of all of the mindnumbing trivialness, and if that was true about his relationships with others, it could certainly be true in every regard. All he had to do was find the perfect opportunity to unleash it.
Like with most things, it wandered in seemingly without his notice.
Moody was in the midst of one of his long-winded rants about the importance of constant vigilance, obsidian eyes flicking around the room in quick succession ensuring that everyone in attendance was giving him the undivided attention his wizened years deserved.
Death Eaters had set their sights on attacking anyone they deemed inferior no matter their blood status, but the ones they labeled as ‘traitors’ to their magickal origins were at the top of the list. People like Sirius and James, choosing to fraternize with—or in the latter’s case, sully their good breeding with—unsavory characters such as Mugglebornes and Werewolves.
Probably why they’d never received any of the highest-ranking jobs unless wholly by accident. Their relative novicedom aside, sticking their lot on patrols to ensure the continued safety of their streets was absolute hogwash when there was real work to be done elsewhere. Especially when he knew exactly what an evening of shooting the shit with his partner had in store in terms of general excitement.
Such was the reality of his curse of future knowledge.
The problem was, he also knew nothing of true merit was going on anywhere for at least another half year’s time. Not that held any grand significance in the long-term. A few stumbles. A couple of missteps. But things wouldn’t take an actual turn until May of the following year when the Prophecy finally got around and sent Voldemort scrambling to enact his plan prior to the Chosen One’s grand appearance.
There were at least a solid twenty-four straight months until that fateful night where he made the biggest mistake of his life trusting a literal rat to be an adequate replacement for his own brand of constant vigilance. A fact he wouldn’t be replicating a second time around, if he had any say in the matter.
Speaking of which.
That had been a rather interesting side-effect of his eerie new ability to see the whole of his life laid out on a silver platter. Contending with the horrifyingly visceral reaction to walking into a room and seeing James alive and well at the next meeting they both sat for, as well as tamping down the urge to go track Pete down and throttle him while he was still a spineless little coward living with his dear sweet grandmother somewhere out in the sticks.
Picking fights with Dumbledore had also been almost knee-jerk initially. Until he made direct eye contact with the man and his need for continued self-preservation kicked back in, that is.
Dying thanks to a grudge part of him held over events that had yet to transpire was the exact kind of idiotic thing he wasn’t soon to attempt if it could be helped. The same went for being at the mercy of his more emotionally charged whims without first sitting down to think them through with just a tad more forethought than typically executed.
A sodding miracle, in its own right, but never let it be said you couldn’t teach a new dog a few old tricks.
Murdering his least favorite school chum or punching his ex-Headmaster in the face for crimes they’d yet to commit against him and his loved ones was the definition of barking. There were far easier methods to achieving his goals that wouldn’t simultaneously net him another quick trip to Azkaban, and he was more than happy to adhere to them to the best of his abilities.
So long as he simply avoided making those same grave mistakes in where he could wrongfully place his unwavering trust, there’d never be a reason to seek vengeance. Funny how sometimes the most obvious answer to a problem was often the correct one, to boot.
The task had become his entire raison d’etre. Bypassing what had once been an inevitability by erasing one tiny piece of the puzzle from existence knowing full and well it was actually kind of a big fucking deal.
Why shouldn’t he halt the senseless sacrifice when he knew it was all for naught? If Voldemort couldn’t be stopped without first hunting down those freaky little artifacts, then they had bigger issues on their hands than who could and could not be trusted with sensitive information going forward, or which places were at the mercy of the next Death Eater raid.
So maybe there was one more tiny little thing about the future he wanted to change up. How he’d go about doing it was still yet unforeseen, but ruminating on the problem certainly kept him entertained on the one level while his body continued on autopilot much the way it had back in History of Magic anytime Binns opened his mouth and wheezed useless information at them.
At least this time, he actually knew what was going on while being accused of failure to pay attention. A small perk he’d seek to utilize whenever and wherever he saw fit.
“Black,” Moody snapped, drawing several sets of eyes to where he’d been sinking lower and lower in his chair with every minute the man prattled on incessantly to the rest of them.
It wasn’t his fault hearing the same subject matter twice almost verbatim was likely to make him tear his own hair out. So he was easily bored. So what? That wasn’t a crime in and of itself.
“Are you even listening anymore, or is there someplace else you’d rather be? Because that can be arranged if you’re too infantile to sit here with the rest of the adults,” the man continued in his usual long-winded fashion, the full focus of his jet black eyes boring into the direct centre of his forehead with enough force to actually tingle ever so slightly in tandem. “I should think a couple of days on Auror lunch duty would help to straighten you out.”
“You were telling us about the latest intel of where Travers and Dolohav were last spotted conspiring with a coven of vampires,” Sirius drawled, because he was also never not going to be one-hundred-percent a giant pain in the arse whenever the fancy struck.
Fisting his hips in response, the man sought to prove him a slag by any means necessary. “And where was this purported sighting, if you’d like that gold star instead of a solid week of playing errand boy for your sass,” he asked with an air of moral superiority roughly a kilometer wide.
If only the questions on all of his tests had been so easy to drum up on a moment’s notice. Perhaps then he could have gotten old Minnie off his back sooner rather than later where the subject of his half-arsed attempt to take her lessons seriously was concerned.
“Near to Surrey,” he recited almost mechanically, allowing the memories never far from the surface to swoop in and do their thing with or without his continued consent.
“Although the exact location is hard to pinpoint as the number of eye-witnesses who aren’t suffering the effects of an attack and a good memory scrub are few and far between. Their bodies were all found to the northeast, but there’s reason to believe the actual meetings are taking place somewhere much further south. Teams are being dispatched throughout the area just in case someone can collect a lead before the next attack, but our numbers are stretched thin as it is, and so we all need to remain vigilant no matter how innocuous the job might seem at first glance.”
Sitting up a little straighter then, he curled his hands beneath his chin and gave the man the best rendition of his cheekiest, most insincere grin imaginable. “Do I have that about right, or would you prefer a more in-depth retelling? I’m afraid my ability to repeat things verbatim after a certain point are woefully defunct, but I can try harder, if you think it necessary.”
“That’s quite enough out of you for one afternoon,” Moody groused, resuming the meeting in the next breath as if he had never once derailed the lecture to do anything in the slightest that might reflect poorly on his typically ironwrought instinct for sniffing out dissent.
Had he not the luxury of using his brain power for other arguably more important matters, Sirius actually would have been right there along with the other Order members taking the situation about as seriously as he was wholly capable. Which was a far cry from what some might say was warranted, but hey, his mother hadn’t managed to beat the insufferable out of him in all her sixteen years of trying. Why should he allow life to finish the job in her stead?
It wasn’t until they were all dismissed with their respective missions that he even allowed himself a moment to really reflect on what had been discussed that day in full.
Vampires. Near to Surrey. A string of brutal attacks on both muggle and wizard-kind alike. Death Eater sightings. That’s right, he remembered hearing about the unfortunate incident involving a pair of scouters who had accidentally stumbled upon the coven of ten-plus nasty little bloodsuckers roaming the countryside around Sutton that had only narrowly gotten word off to the Aurors to come save the day in time to round the entire group up for a solid week of intense questioning.
In the end, all it had amounted to was yet another Death Eater distraction keeping their people popping off all over the country attempting to put out small fires while the actual backroom deals were going on in places they’d never hope to gain access to without a good bit of luck.
A rather Slytherin-esque approach, if ever there was one, but it made sense to him why keeping your enemy on their toes was a decent tactic no matter who the mastermind behind the deception. Being stretched thin left the remainder of their people scrambling at the best of times, and outright sloppy at the worst.
No casualties came about from the incident. After a couple days’ recovery in Mungo’s, the pair were off again doing Godric knows what else for the remainder of their short-lived careers. Certainly nothing of note, if he couldn’t even recall their names offhand.
And yet.
Nipping the entire fiasco in the bud would be about as easy as letting the whole thing go to plan the way it was intended to. It couldn’t hurt to spare a few extra resources here and there. Even if the results would be lackluster at best. Surely the time and energy afforded to their side would be a nice reprieve from the constant rushing everywhere thing they had going on?
A simple suggestion wouldn’t change the hands of fate drastically.
Spinning on his heel halfway to the floo point without so much as an explanation to his poor partner for why he was suddenly rushing in the opposite direction, Sirius caught up with Moody as the man was still tidying up the room they used for their meetings and offered up a sheepish smile by way of introduction to his hairbrained scheme.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he began, gesturing to the near-spotless quality of the room at large. “But I was going over what you said today in my head, and if it isn’t too much trouble, I think it would be wise to deploy another group slightly to the northwest of where the initial victims were first discovered.”
“It is,” the man snapped, floating a small cloud of debris over to the nearest bin and depositing it without sparing so much as a single secondary glance his way.
Not that he needed the assistance cataloging everything happening around him in a mere instant, as it stood. Even without the magically imbued mechanism he’d favor in his later years after losing his sight on one side, it was nearly uncanny how terrifyingly perceptive his natural deductive reasoning skills happened to be.
That, or the intense bouts of paranoia hit the mark often enough to rely on them through basal instinct alone. Hard to say for certain.
A beat passed, and he flicked his gaze over in quiet consideration, pocketing his wand and finally turning to attention with his arms laced neatly behind his back and a mask of cold indifference painting his already haggard appearance in an even harsher scowl. “And why do you think I should listen to a thing you have to say after that little stunt you pulled not even thirty minutes ago, hm? Is your ego already so large you think yourself smarter than everyone else here in attendance?”
“Vampires build nests,” is what he answered with in order to spare both of them the headache of seeing just whose ego truly was the biggest in the building.
Sirius may be an absolute wanker when he wanted to be, but even he wasn’t so fragile as to bite the head off anyone who deigned to disagree with him. At least, not yet. There was still room to flourish in that department once he had a few more notable merits under his belt.
True to form, the man let out a snort of derision so loud it was a dismissal in its own right. Not that that stopped him from tacking on a quick explanation as to why the comment was a wholly unnecessary contribution. “Thanks for the impromptu Beasts’ lesson, but I’m well aware of the various habits of many dark creatures. You don’t get where I am going in blind.”
“So then you’re already aware they rarely hunt outside of a five-kilometer range of the place they choose to nest for any extended period,” he agreed with a sage nod, shoving his hands down into the pockets of his work robes and offering a quick shrug for good measure. “I guess I hadn’t thought about the fact you probably scoured the area before deciding to push south instead. Sorry for the inconvenience and the waste of your time. I’ll be off, then.”
No sooner had he made to leave, Sirius heard the deep harrumph that signified he’d earned the right to say his piece at least as a courtesy as another member of the Order. Whether or not the advice was heeded after the fact was up to Alastor Moody himself.
“What makes you so sure the bodies weren’t taken that way after the fact as a means of throwing us off the trail,” Moody asked once he’d given some half-arsed spiel involving all the many things he could recall about dark creatures and why that meant they were greatly overthinking the situation.
All true, mind you, but wholeheartedly straight out of his impeccable knack for bullshitting his way through many a fudged conversation.
It really did not matter in the slightest if he was believed. No one would suffer for the brushoff other than the pair stumbling into the right place at the wrong time.
Even still, when he shrugged the inquiry off with a lopsided smile, he knew he was barking up the correct tree using the exact phrasing that came to mind as if from some outside source supplying it straight to his mouth. “Call it a gut instinct, I suppose. I just don’t think the Death Eaters half that dedicated to bother when we’re all too busy chasing our tails trying to find the next lead on their whereabouts. And why should they? We’re all far too careful to fall into an obvious trap.”
“I’ll take it into consideration,” the man replied with a curt nod, dark eyes boring into his very soul once more.
Images of that electric blue monstrosity flashed in his mind, and it was all he could do to contain the worst of his full-body shiver.
Excusing himself shortly thereafter with the reminder he had a job to do no matter how painfully dreadful, Sirius caught back up with Dearborn in roughly the same place he’d left him for another wild ride of shooting the shit to no avail. At least it wasn’t all bad. Getting out of the house and walking the streets a free man was infinitely better than the lot his ‘other self’ had drawn.
If there was one thing he promised to see through to fruition, it was to never allow anything in his life to cage him in again. Whatever else came his way—the struggles and the hardships he knew couldn’t be run from forever—it was sure to be a cakewalk in comparison.
Of that much, he was undoubtedly certain.
The verdict came in the way Moody praised him for his sharp mind at the start of the next meeting. Of course, by then, he’d put the entire thing out of his thoughts far enough that it was actually quite the shock to hear the rhetoric change significantly from the one circling his memories with its glum undertones and nothing-to-report dictation he’d been expecting to waltz in on.
So maybe the man was slightly more open to suggestion that he’d first clocked. Good to know, should ever he wish to lend another hand out of the kindness of his heart.
That it earned him a couple of hard slaps on the back from a few of the more seasoned members certainly wasn’t a downside, either. Nor that the whole of the afternoon proved new enough from there on out he was able to enjoy a bit of the goings on when it no longer felt oppressively scripted.
In hindsight, he should have guessed that wouldn’t be the last time he’d tweak the narrative around to fit a greater purpose. Nor the last he was held back at the end of a meeting to go over another few of their plans with a fresh pair of eyes before Moody and the other Aurors decided the best method for tackling their ever-growing problem.
In that regard, he really had given a more honest opinion than outright manipulated the proceedings to bypass any one specific catastrophe.
Just because he knew several key factors about where Voldemort would focus the better portion of his energy didn’t mean he was an actual prophet. No matter how thoroughly he boasted his incredible skill for figuring things out long before his mates ever did, he was still a mortal man with all the sad truth that limitation entailed. One with a whole heap of important information swimming around in his brain, but a human person nonetheless. Not even he could guess every single thing that might transpire out of the gaps of his knowledge with perfect accuracy.
Although, that was probably for the best.
It certainly kept him from having to pick and choose what to disclose by happenstance and what to allow to slip by completely unnoticed. And that was a blessing, in its own right, because finding himself strapped to a chair with the accusation of being a spy or some other nefarious misdeed while force-fed veritaserum would have been exceptionally disastrous. For everyone, not only himself.
There was little doubt in his mind things would go sideways at some point if Alastor Moody knew the full scope of the future from there on out. Far too many variables would be left totally up to chance, and any hope there was for a quiet upheaval would go straight out the window when the man then stormed the closest known Death Eater meeting point plucked free from his memories with the entire might of the Ministry guarding his back.
Stealth was a decidedly easier method for handling a problem of that dire magnitude. Albus Dumbledore knew that much, if no one else, which is why their old Headmaster often allowed certain pieces of information to go undisclosed no matter how detrimental they might be to any far more innocent individuals in the process.
It might be a tad callous, but it got the job done, in the end. If Sirius had to choose between the whole of the wizarding world or the small handful of souls that made life seemingly worthwhile, he knew exactly what he’d pick every damn time without fail.
Found family always came first. No questions asked.
So what if he’d hardly spent more than a few lingering moments sprinkled over the course of the next handful of weeks with those same purported subjects of his unyielding devotion? It wasn’t as if he’d been intending to open the floodgate to extra work and even less by way of other, arguably more difficult social obligations when he initially set out to fix that tiny little issue through unsolicited advice and a rather firm notion he was correct in this and seemingly all other ways that mattered most.
Moody was simply persuasive in that regard. When he wasn’t being a right stubborn old fool who refused to see reason… and Sirius wasn’t actively avoiding sorting through his rather complicated emotions about speaking with his best mate on the one hand while the memory of the last time he might ever see James burned the back of his eyelids with its harrowing, gut-wrenching imagery.
Perhaps one of the biggest downsides to the curse. Try as he might, he couldn’t escape the things he would have sooner forgotten about the future looming in the distance any more than he could escape his own face in the mirror without pointedly looking the other way.
Keeping busy did wonders in that department. The less free time he had to dwell on what was at stake, the more he was able to pretend he wasn’t running from the truth ready to clock him over the head the moment he least expected it.
James and Lily were honestly the least of his problems, anyhow. They’d be fine so long as he stuck to the golden rule and trusted no one but himself to see the matter sorted before the other shoe had a chance to finally drop.
It was a certain roommate of his that proved the far more cumbersome subject to conquer. Which is probably why he pulled double shifts left and right under the guise he wanted to be as helpful as humanly possible before obligation stole the excuse out of his hands the instant the moon reached her budding crescendo.
Somehow, in the process of tackling everything he’d thrust on his own plate by design, he’d forgotten the most important aspect of his continued absence. Pretending like he didn’t know what was breathing down his neck the closer October came to slipping into yet another crisp, agonizing month entirely.
Halloween was arguably his least favorite holiday for all it had never done anything to him except remind him of why he needed to do better going forward. But there was a singular worse date that seemed to catch him by surprise every damn year without fail. November the first. Two days before his birthday, and a reoccurring event in his life that held way too much significance for such an otherwise innocuous moment in the grand scheme of everything else that followed after.
No sooner had Sirius opened the door, he smelled the unmistakable scent of something burning.
Normally he wouldn’t think too much of it. After all, Remus was notoriously horrible at providing sustenance for himself at any given time no matter the level of preparation. If it wasn’t a piece of toast or putting the kettle on to boil for tea, it was likely to end in the bin far more often than it ever managed to reach a plate.
That changed significantly the closer it came to the full moon and his roommate’s inability to even function through the entirety of a sentence, let alone take the steps necessary to walk from his bedroom to the kitchen without collapsing from sheer bone-deep exhaustion. If he then tried to make his own meal because there was nothing available to him otherwise, just how much extra damage could he do to himself wholly by accident?
How much of it would be Sirius’ fault for leaving the man all alone after he promised he’d keep him safe?
As the first glimmer of true panic set in, the only thing that he could think was that he had done it once again. Buggered something that should have been so easy with his own abject selfishness.
New dog, same old trick.
It didn’t take much to get from the door all the way to the kitchen. Only a few, quick strides, and then he was through the archway with the beginnings of a question clogging up his throat.
In a different time and place, he even asked it. Saw the mess on the floor and his poor sad boy slumped over the table with his head in his hands, and went to his knees in desperation to erase whatever had ruined his lover’s day so thoroughly as to cause him such unwanted distress.
No. Not his lover. Remus was his friend. His absolute most precious, heartbreakingly platonic best mate. If the Sirius of that moment was ever going to right all the many wrongs another version of him had committed in a single lifetime, he’d do well to remember that fact. No matter how much it hurt him to hold his affections back indefinitely. No matter how desperately his boy begged for a different outcome that could never come to pass.
Just because he wanted something with every fibre of his being was no excuse to forget that he was a plague to those around him about as much as he tried to be their unwitting salvation. Everything he touched withered away in some fashion inevitably. Be it loneliness or heartbreak, endless longing or their untimely demise, the only way he knew how to handle fragile things was by breaking them and then crying over the shattered pieces of their destruction.
Another version of him had more than proven that there was no way to keep his word when he was still far too selfish to care about the consequences of his idiotic actions. In a world riddled with uncertainty as to his likelihood of surviving the months that followed his grand act of righteous heroism, the kindest thing he could ever do is to allow the opportunity for future happiness to spring eternal from the bed of his first and only truly selfless sacrifice.
And it would. Without a doubt, Remus would only be as lonely as he allowed himself to be by chasing after a ghost that no longer haunted the halls of his heart with its cruel reminder of life’s endless impermanence.
At the first hesitant glance of amber eyes flicking toward him in question as to why he’d stood there seemingly rooted to the spot without so much as a word of inquiry for the reasons of the accidental spoiling of the mood, the spell was broken.
In another lifetime, Sirius cradled that sad face in his hands and pressed his lips to the other’s mouth with the hope to chase away the last of their shared demons. In this one, he magicked the mess into the bin and reminded himself that the only one who had to suffer the loss of their magnificent relationship was thankfully left to an absolute singular.
Just him.
And when he died—as he was certainly going to do no matter how many days or years slipped by to encompass the full span of his young life—maybe his soul could rest easy this time knowing the expression Remus wore as he breathed his final breath wasn’t one of crushing acceptance for a road left barren on the back of a broken promise to never again leave him alone.
The only person who needed to know how badly he’d hurt the both of them every step of the way was Sirius.