(no subject)
As Certain Dark Things Are To Be Loved (HP; R/S; 2,322 words; PG-13 for Very Bad Language and implications that mansex at one point occured.)
You only return to Sirius’s bedroom once, after. You only do it because it’s completely necessary- his things need to be seen to, after all, and Harry is hardly in a state to do this room. Nor are you, actually, but Molly and Tonks and everybody else who’s decided to help clear out Grimmauld Place is leaving a painfully conspicuous swath around the room, to the point where they’ve done the rooms on both sides and even the cupboard across the hall but left Sirius’s room untouched. The knowledge that they’re leaving it for you makes you a little bit sick, not in the frantic, fevered way of passion but in a way that makes you feel dull and dead in your stomach, a chronic illness that nothing will ever heal. Clearing out the room won’t heal it, won’t even make it better, but leaving it alone, abandoned, makes the sickness worse.
Besides, you think, it’s your right to do it. It’s yours. Yours alone. You imagine that if the boy tried to set foot within, you’d snarl and snap, you’d bite, proprietary as ever when it comes to Sirius. It’s not his! What does Harry know, of loss? What does he know of Sirius? Hell, what does he know of any of them, even Lily and James? They were yours, they didn’t create you but they made you, they were a part of you, the part that bled, the part that laughed, the part that was human and whole. He’s been- he’s never needed them, he’s had others, he hasn’t had to go to sleep every night- every night, every bloody night- with them pleading and dancing and smiling and dying in his head. He is not left with only ashes. They are yours, god damn it, Sirius is yours. Was yours. Was. Not his.
Maybe the cleaning will banish some of this incoherent, lost anger. You refuse to think, Maybe it will bring him back, though the thought is hovering just behind your eyes.
And so you do it. You send them all away one night, your helpers, not caring that they know why when they look at you and the knowledge fills their eyes with pity.
You stand in front of the door for a quarter of an hour, simply staring. You were a Gryffindor, once, but you’re not brave. You feel nothing but dread as your eyes trace the grain of the wood, nothing but cold as you finally grasp the porcelain knob and feel out the jagged dings with your fingers. You stop that way, knob half-twisted, and you consider it. That’s what you do, after all. You analyze things. It’s what got you termed a Wet Blanket a thousand times by your friends and it’s what made you invaluable to them. So you analyze this. Why are you scared? It’s not what you’re going to see- oh, no. Nothing seen can hold fear for you, not anymore. You’ve seen the corpses of the brilliant James Potter and his wife, the kindest witch you’ve ever known. You’ve seen Voldemort’s glowing, blood-swamped eyes. You’ve seen all the terrors this house has to offer, the unnameable dark creatures and the screaming portraits and the evidences of the incredibly painful childhood of the person you love most.
You’ve seen Sirius fall through the Veil.
There is nothing more terrible that you could see. Nothing in this world, anywhere, ever, much less in Sirius’s bedroom, where you have slept a hundred times. Of what, then, are you afraid?
Realization comes quietly. It’s what you won’t see. The lump made by a warm body in the bed, the shock of black hair, the tiny dimple when he smiles that no one but you has gotten close enough to know, that you will never know again.
Armed with this knowledge, the face- or lack thereof- of your fear, you square your shoulders. You pull in a thready breath. You finish turning the knob.
It is- Christ. It is just like him. It is tattered, and mangy, and covered in dog’s hair, and so, so dear. You wade in through the mess, through the jumpers strewn on the floor. Some of them are yours, you know. Some of them are his. Mostly it is one and the same.
It takes hours, hours of folding and dusting and squinting around the dull, desolate ache in your head. You’re not ready for this, you think a thousand times. But you’ll never be ready. You could live a millennium and never be ready for this simple task. If life has taught you one thing, it’s that the universe doesn’t care whether or not you’re ready when it takes from you. It just takes, and leaves you to grow around the pieces, and never mind the bruises.
When you’ve finished, you lay on the bare wooden floor never-minding the bruises, and create an intimacy with the ceiling. There are things scratched into it, things that your keen werewolf eyes can read easily. It’s equally easy to imagine a teenaged Sirius levitating himself up and taking a knife to his ceiling until it reads “Fuck purebloods,” and “Walburga Black is a cunt.” You don’t know if you want to laugh for him, or weep.
Eventually a crick in your neck makes you turn it, and you find yourself staring into the dark beneath Sirius’s bed. Your eyes adjust slowly, until you can make out the dust bunnies. Sirius probably had names for them all. It would be like him.
You shut your eyes against the tears that well up at that thought, of all things. It’s a moment before you can open them, blinking away the water that collects in your lashes and blurs your vision, and in that moment you think you see something, some incongruous lump protruding from the underside of the bed. Without thinking about it, you reach out, and yes, there’s a catch, and a click, and you pull a small box down.
It’s wooden, its dragon carvings so old that they’re half worn down, and surprisingly lacking in dust. For a moment you think about not opening it, because obviously it was private. But- well, he’s gone. He’s gone, and you need what’s left of him. He loved you. He wouldn’t begrudge you it.
It’s a treasure box, and, you soon realize, one that has been recently used. There’s a photograph on top, one that you’d never known was taken. In it, you’re sleeping, the scars across your face vivid in the moonlight that falls across your cheeks. Your chest moves slowly up and down with breath. The grey at your temples marks it as undeniably recent.
It nearly decimates you.
But it doesn’t, because you’ve survived too much to be destroyed now. Of course you keep going. You couldn’t stop if you wanted to. There have always been two driving forces beyond your control or comprehension. One is the moon. The other, Sirius.
A golden snitch- James’s? you wonder, fingering it. You never did see James tossing it after that day at the lake after OWLs. Maybe Sirius took it then. He always was a packrat, always needed things close to him.
More photographs, all of them full of life. You recognize one as a picture of a young Sirius and an infant Nymphadora. In it, he tosses the tiny girl in the air over and over, grinning in a way that you had thought was reserved for you and James and Peter. You tuck the picture into a pocket, knowing Tonks will want it.
At the bottom of the box are folded papers, enough that they make a thick padding along its base. They’re yellowing with age and make crackling noises as you unfold them. They’re covered in writing, all of them. Letters. And because you’ve gone this far, you don’t even try to talk yourself out of reading them.
The first few are marked by the large, wavering letters of a child’s hand, and the spelling is similarly atrocious.
Sirus,
the first says,
y do I hav to rite to yu we cud jus tahk!
And then, in a careful, deliberate script, as if the writer had been carefully trained in the art of signing his name even at so young an age,
Regulus Black
You feel as if you’ve stumbled in on a strange couple kissing goodbye, so weirdly intimate is the revelation that Sirius kept something of his brother. It should deter you, you know, from this voyeurism on dead children. It doesn’t.
Sir I us,
Ok ok I no ther is a I now pleas dont put sumthin in my bed.
I dont lik spyders.
Regulus Black
They continue on in this vein, full of childish concerns and squabbles. The handwriting improves, and then the spelling does as well. Only a few hold you.
Sirius,
I’m so sorry about Charlemagne. I really didn’t mean to spook him you know. And he did break my arm! Anyway I asked Mum not to have him, you know, but she won’t listen, you know how she is. And before you call me her precious baby let me remind you that if he’d broke yours she’d do the same. Anyway you’re the one who got a horse for your eleventh birthday, if I get one for mine you can have it alright? Don’t be mad.
Regulus the Stupid
Sirius,
Look, I know you’re all upset about Andromeda, but you know she brought it on herself. I don’t like it either, but that’s how family is. We’re lucky to be Blacks, we have certain things to uphold! You know that as well as I do. Though I could wish Mother and the relatives were less…furious about it. I just think it’s sad.
Reg
There comes, here, a gap of what might be several years; you can tell partly from the way the handwriting change, but mostly because you have been intimately attuned to every bit of Sirius’s life since long before you realized it. You know when Andromeda left, and you know when Sirius followed. The gap in between them is the gap in the letters, you know that almost before you start to read.
Sirius,
I wonder if you even check under the Gargoyle for letters anymore. I bet you don’t. You’re an utter prig and an idiot to boot. Of course you don’t. This is useless.
Look, you don’t…you don’t have to be Andromeda, all right? There are other options. You maybe be a prig and an idiot but you’re still a Black. You shouldn’t try to change that. It’s useless, all right? It’ll kill Mother. I don’t care what you say, you don’t want that. You’re one of us and nothing you do will really change that. Just…just grow up, Sirius! For Merlin’s sake, just grow up! Do you know how much I’d give to be the Heir, to have one tenth of what you…Shut up, shut up, shut up, I know now you’re saying that once you leave I’ll get to be “their bloody Heir,” but fuck you, I don’t want it at that price. No matter what Cissa says, you’re still my brother and I hate you, Merlin I hate you, but I wouldn’t change that. Not for the world.
So you’d better not change it either, you utter ass.
Just stay.
Regulus
There are pockmarks in the paper, little jagged circles where the paper has creased and peaked, gone a bit soft. Tears, you realize with a feeling like a blow to your chest. Tear stains. You wonder which one cried, holding this letter. In your mind you see Regulus in the hallways, the autumn after Sirius ran away from home, looking monochrome and lost. You see Sirius after one of the other Aurors told him that they’d found Regulus’s body, clutching the doorframe like his lungs have suddenly been taken away, crying the terrible hot tears of a broken-hearted little boy in bed that night, tears which he’d refused to speak about the next morning. Both of them, you think. Oh God.
You wonder when Sirius found it, if it was before he left or when he came back to Grimmauld Place after Azkaban. You wonder if it would have broken him more to find it before or after. You wonder if it matters.
Oh, children. Oh, boys and their losses. Lost boys.
After a while you stand, unsteady and sore. You want to make a gesture. No, what you want to do is place these things, these photographs and letters, in a casket with Sirius, lay them over his heart. But there is no casket. There is no body.
There is only you.
So you clutch them to your heart instead.
“Sirius,” you say, desperately, to the room, to the air. No. To the bed curtains. “Sirius, I’ll hold them for you. The things you loved. I’ll hold them close. It’s all right now. It’s all right. I promise.”
For him. For him you can love Nympadora, the niece in his arms. For him you can love lost Regulus. For him you can love Dumbledore, and McGonagall, and the Weasleys. For him you can love Snape, the man he hated most, and you can love Draco, the small cousin he never dandled as an infant. For him you can love Harry. For him you can love the whole damn world.
For him you can love yourself.
You walk out of the room slowly, steadfastly, without a tremble to your step. Your hands do not tremble around the box or on the doorknob. For him you look forward, never back, holding the love, knowing that no matter who dies, it cannot, but not letting it destroy you. You will survive. You will survive until you don’t, just as they did, all of them, loving where you can, even where you hate. He did.
You go on.
You only return to Sirius’s bedroom once, after. You only do it because it’s completely necessary- his things need to be seen to, after all, and Harry is hardly in a state to do this room. Nor are you, actually, but Molly and Tonks and everybody else who’s decided to help clear out Grimmauld Place is leaving a painfully conspicuous swath around the room, to the point where they’ve done the rooms on both sides and even the cupboard across the hall but left Sirius’s room untouched. The knowledge that they’re leaving it for you makes you a little bit sick, not in the frantic, fevered way of passion but in a way that makes you feel dull and dead in your stomach, a chronic illness that nothing will ever heal. Clearing out the room won’t heal it, won’t even make it better, but leaving it alone, abandoned, makes the sickness worse.
Besides, you think, it’s your right to do it. It’s yours. Yours alone. You imagine that if the boy tried to set foot within, you’d snarl and snap, you’d bite, proprietary as ever when it comes to Sirius. It’s not his! What does Harry know, of loss? What does he know of Sirius? Hell, what does he know of any of them, even Lily and James? They were yours, they didn’t create you but they made you, they were a part of you, the part that bled, the part that laughed, the part that was human and whole. He’s been- he’s never needed them, he’s had others, he hasn’t had to go to sleep every night- every night, every bloody night- with them pleading and dancing and smiling and dying in his head. He is not left with only ashes. They are yours, god damn it, Sirius is yours. Was yours. Was. Not his.
Maybe the cleaning will banish some of this incoherent, lost anger. You refuse to think, Maybe it will bring him back, though the thought is hovering just behind your eyes.
And so you do it. You send them all away one night, your helpers, not caring that they know why when they look at you and the knowledge fills their eyes with pity.
You stand in front of the door for a quarter of an hour, simply staring. You were a Gryffindor, once, but you’re not brave. You feel nothing but dread as your eyes trace the grain of the wood, nothing but cold as you finally grasp the porcelain knob and feel out the jagged dings with your fingers. You stop that way, knob half-twisted, and you consider it. That’s what you do, after all. You analyze things. It’s what got you termed a Wet Blanket a thousand times by your friends and it’s what made you invaluable to them. So you analyze this. Why are you scared? It’s not what you’re going to see- oh, no. Nothing seen can hold fear for you, not anymore. You’ve seen the corpses of the brilliant James Potter and his wife, the kindest witch you’ve ever known. You’ve seen Voldemort’s glowing, blood-swamped eyes. You’ve seen all the terrors this house has to offer, the unnameable dark creatures and the screaming portraits and the evidences of the incredibly painful childhood of the person you love most.
You’ve seen Sirius fall through the Veil.
There is nothing more terrible that you could see. Nothing in this world, anywhere, ever, much less in Sirius’s bedroom, where you have slept a hundred times. Of what, then, are you afraid?
Realization comes quietly. It’s what you won’t see. The lump made by a warm body in the bed, the shock of black hair, the tiny dimple when he smiles that no one but you has gotten close enough to know, that you will never know again.
Armed with this knowledge, the face- or lack thereof- of your fear, you square your shoulders. You pull in a thready breath. You finish turning the knob.
It is- Christ. It is just like him. It is tattered, and mangy, and covered in dog’s hair, and so, so dear. You wade in through the mess, through the jumpers strewn on the floor. Some of them are yours, you know. Some of them are his. Mostly it is one and the same.
It takes hours, hours of folding and dusting and squinting around the dull, desolate ache in your head. You’re not ready for this, you think a thousand times. But you’ll never be ready. You could live a millennium and never be ready for this simple task. If life has taught you one thing, it’s that the universe doesn’t care whether or not you’re ready when it takes from you. It just takes, and leaves you to grow around the pieces, and never mind the bruises.
When you’ve finished, you lay on the bare wooden floor never-minding the bruises, and create an intimacy with the ceiling. There are things scratched into it, things that your keen werewolf eyes can read easily. It’s equally easy to imagine a teenaged Sirius levitating himself up and taking a knife to his ceiling until it reads “Fuck purebloods,” and “Walburga Black is a cunt.” You don’t know if you want to laugh for him, or weep.
Eventually a crick in your neck makes you turn it, and you find yourself staring into the dark beneath Sirius’s bed. Your eyes adjust slowly, until you can make out the dust bunnies. Sirius probably had names for them all. It would be like him.
You shut your eyes against the tears that well up at that thought, of all things. It’s a moment before you can open them, blinking away the water that collects in your lashes and blurs your vision, and in that moment you think you see something, some incongruous lump protruding from the underside of the bed. Without thinking about it, you reach out, and yes, there’s a catch, and a click, and you pull a small box down.
It’s wooden, its dragon carvings so old that they’re half worn down, and surprisingly lacking in dust. For a moment you think about not opening it, because obviously it was private. But- well, he’s gone. He’s gone, and you need what’s left of him. He loved you. He wouldn’t begrudge you it.
It’s a treasure box, and, you soon realize, one that has been recently used. There’s a photograph on top, one that you’d never known was taken. In it, you’re sleeping, the scars across your face vivid in the moonlight that falls across your cheeks. Your chest moves slowly up and down with breath. The grey at your temples marks it as undeniably recent.
It nearly decimates you.
But it doesn’t, because you’ve survived too much to be destroyed now. Of course you keep going. You couldn’t stop if you wanted to. There have always been two driving forces beyond your control or comprehension. One is the moon. The other, Sirius.
A golden snitch- James’s? you wonder, fingering it. You never did see James tossing it after that day at the lake after OWLs. Maybe Sirius took it then. He always was a packrat, always needed things close to him.
More photographs, all of them full of life. You recognize one as a picture of a young Sirius and an infant Nymphadora. In it, he tosses the tiny girl in the air over and over, grinning in a way that you had thought was reserved for you and James and Peter. You tuck the picture into a pocket, knowing Tonks will want it.
At the bottom of the box are folded papers, enough that they make a thick padding along its base. They’re yellowing with age and make crackling noises as you unfold them. They’re covered in writing, all of them. Letters. And because you’ve gone this far, you don’t even try to talk yourself out of reading them.
The first few are marked by the large, wavering letters of a child’s hand, and the spelling is similarly atrocious.
Sirus,
the first says,
y do I hav to rite to yu we cud jus tahk!
And then, in a careful, deliberate script, as if the writer had been carefully trained in the art of signing his name even at so young an age,
Regulus Black
You feel as if you’ve stumbled in on a strange couple kissing goodbye, so weirdly intimate is the revelation that Sirius kept something of his brother. It should deter you, you know, from this voyeurism on dead children. It doesn’t.
Sir I us,
Ok ok I no ther is a I now pleas dont put sumthin in my bed.
I dont lik spyders.
Regulus Black
They continue on in this vein, full of childish concerns and squabbles. The handwriting improves, and then the spelling does as well. Only a few hold you.
Sirius,
I’m so sorry about Charlemagne. I really didn’t mean to spook him you know. And he did break my arm! Anyway I asked Mum not to have him, you know, but she won’t listen, you know how she is. And before you call me her precious baby let me remind you that if he’d broke yours she’d do the same. Anyway you’re the one who got a horse for your eleventh birthday, if I get one for mine you can have it alright? Don’t be mad.
Regulus the Stupid
Sirius,
Look, I know you’re all upset about Andromeda, but you know she brought it on herself. I don’t like it either, but that’s how family is. We’re lucky to be Blacks, we have certain things to uphold! You know that as well as I do. Though I could wish Mother and the relatives were less…furious about it. I just think it’s sad.
Reg
There comes, here, a gap of what might be several years; you can tell partly from the way the handwriting change, but mostly because you have been intimately attuned to every bit of Sirius’s life since long before you realized it. You know when Andromeda left, and you know when Sirius followed. The gap in between them is the gap in the letters, you know that almost before you start to read.
Sirius,
I wonder if you even check under the Gargoyle for letters anymore. I bet you don’t. You’re an utter prig and an idiot to boot. Of course you don’t. This is useless.
Look, you don’t…you don’t have to be Andromeda, all right? There are other options. You maybe be a prig and an idiot but you’re still a Black. You shouldn’t try to change that. It’s useless, all right? It’ll kill Mother. I don’t care what you say, you don’t want that. You’re one of us and nothing you do will really change that. Just…just grow up, Sirius! For Merlin’s sake, just grow up! Do you know how much I’d give to be the Heir, to have one tenth of what you…Shut up, shut up, shut up, I know now you’re saying that once you leave I’ll get to be “their bloody Heir,” but fuck you, I don’t want it at that price. No matter what Cissa says, you’re still my brother and I hate you, Merlin I hate you, but I wouldn’t change that. Not for the world.
So you’d better not change it either, you utter ass.
Just stay.
Regulus
There are pockmarks in the paper, little jagged circles where the paper has creased and peaked, gone a bit soft. Tears, you realize with a feeling like a blow to your chest. Tear stains. You wonder which one cried, holding this letter. In your mind you see Regulus in the hallways, the autumn after Sirius ran away from home, looking monochrome and lost. You see Sirius after one of the other Aurors told him that they’d found Regulus’s body, clutching the doorframe like his lungs have suddenly been taken away, crying the terrible hot tears of a broken-hearted little boy in bed that night, tears which he’d refused to speak about the next morning. Both of them, you think. Oh God.
You wonder when Sirius found it, if it was before he left or when he came back to Grimmauld Place after Azkaban. You wonder if it would have broken him more to find it before or after. You wonder if it matters.
Oh, children. Oh, boys and their losses. Lost boys.
After a while you stand, unsteady and sore. You want to make a gesture. No, what you want to do is place these things, these photographs and letters, in a casket with Sirius, lay them over his heart. But there is no casket. There is no body.
There is only you.
So you clutch them to your heart instead.
“Sirius,” you say, desperately, to the room, to the air. No. To the bed curtains. “Sirius, I’ll hold them for you. The things you loved. I’ll hold them close. It’s all right now. It’s all right. I promise.”
For him. For him you can love Nympadora, the niece in his arms. For him you can love lost Regulus. For him you can love Dumbledore, and McGonagall, and the Weasleys. For him you can love Snape, the man he hated most, and you can love Draco, the small cousin he never dandled as an infant. For him you can love Harry. For him you can love the whole damn world.
For him you can love yourself.
You walk out of the room slowly, steadfastly, without a tremble to your step. Your hands do not tremble around the box or on the doorknob. For him you look forward, never back, holding the love, knowing that no matter who dies, it cannot, but not letting it destroy you. You will survive. You will survive until you don’t, just as they did, all of them, loving where you can, even where you hate. He did.
You go on.