#snirus

‘That’s not how he works though.’

The chains of the swing rattle as he sits down.

‘He doesn’t - I don’t know how to put this - He doesn’t piggyback on random chance. He’s not spontaneous. Believe me, I know. I’ve seen how he freaks out when something isn’t going according to plan… He’s not opportunistic. He plots. He fixates. He obsesses… And everything he does is because he thinks it means something. He goes absolutely feral for signs and symbols and rituals and all those things… He said that himself. Last year. Wormtail wanted him to pick anyone - any old enemy, he’s got enough of them - to use as his blood donor. It would have had the same effect. But he had to have me.’

That’s… That’s true. Sirius remembers it - remembers how he’d sworn when Harry had described Wormy - Wormy who’d held him as a baby, who’d dandled him on his knee at his Christening and laughed when James pretended to give him a sip of his pint - slicing into his arm, remembers how he’d clutched Harry’s shoulder so tightly he’d worried he’d break it and still hadn’t been able to stop, because he’d needed to prove to himself that Harry was still there. That he’d survived this latest horror and was still alive, still flesh and blood and bone.

He’d just - he must have forgotten that part of the story after Harry said that James had emerged from - 

‘And it’s the same with the Prophecy,’ Harry says, still steady, still calm. ‘He could have picked Neville. But he didn’t. He picked me. And once he’d done that - once he’d decided it was about me - that was it. He’s never going to change his mind. He’s never going to think that the Prophecy doesn’t have to be fulfilled, that he could just ignore it and leave me alone. He’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to kill me… And that means I have to kill him first.’

Sirius looks up at him, and even through a haze of tears he looks… he looks okay. He doesn’t seem terrified anymore, not like he did when he was pacing around the drawing room, fiddling with the tat on the shelves and desperately seeking an escape route. But he doesn’t seem like some impossible golden idol either, something magical and untouchable, a tawny, memory-wisp vapour which cannot be grasped between two fingers.

He just seems sure. Like he’s alright. Like he knows what he’s doing.

Like he knows Voldemort. Like he understands him. Like he doesn’t think he’s the intimidating, unstoppable force of pure magic the Order talk about in hushed tones. Like he’s just some bloke, and Harry’s got him sussed.

And something reaches out and shakes Sirius, some realisation that - even though he’s such an enormous, malevolent presence, stalking his life like a hunting dog; even though he’s responsible for the worst thing which has ever happened to him; even though he’s increasingly convinced (not, of course, that he’s imagined it in any detail) that he and Snape are shagging - he can’t actually picture what Voldemort looks like.

He can recall reading Harry’s interview in the Quibbler - the one Snape, looking for the first time like he possessed a modicum of respect for somebody named Potter, said had made Dolores Umbridge nearly shit herself with rage - in picture-perfect detail. He can see how the light looked, and what sort of muck encrusted the table, and what dregs of whisky were in the glass in front of him. He can see the paper and the words and the cartoon of Harry on the front page.

But - for some reason - the description Harry gave of Voldemort - skeletonised, serpentine, unholy - hasn’t ever solidified into an image in his mind.

And that’s - he supposes - because he couldn’t ever picture what he looked like. Even last time.

(Except for his eyes. You could never forget those as long as you lived. Even if you’d only seen them once, burning beneath the shadow of a hood, as they examined James across a battlefield.)

The Dark Lord flits across his thoughts like pigment, diluted with too much water, marbling and splitting and smudging on a page. Like a blurry long-lens photo, slithering across the fading newsprint still pinned to Reg’s walls, of a very tall, very thin man.

A shadow without a face.

And it comes back to him - being Harry’s age, being nagged until he rolled out of bed and put on his best robes, being dragged to Malfoy Manor, his mother hissing in his ear for him to behave, to not be flippant, to say nothing about politics, to not insinuate that Mr Malfoy fucks the peacocks, to refrain for once from embarrassing them all.

Such fucking bullshit - which he’s sure he must have told his mother, probably earning a night without supper for his trouble. His parents’ delusions that they were the most important on earth always vanished the second they came into contact with people with actual authority, inexpertly mutating into something muleish and plebeian and simple-minded and resentful.

His father was smug - his stupid face (Sirius’ face) even more punchable than usual - because he was being allowed to mingle with the great and the - well - not good. But it pinched at him too, it bothered him - you could tell - that - no matter how subtly it was expressed, no matter how fulsomely they would have denied it - Abraxas Malfoy and Romulus Lestrange and the elder Rosier and the elder Avery and the elder Nott and all the rest thought that he was beneath them.

His mother was the same. She was proud - went rapturous and spoke too quickly - of Bella and Cissy going from the draughty Georgian box Uncle Cygnus claimed was a country pile to palatial estates with ballrooms and conservatories and whole battalions of house elves. But she knew - and it bothered her too - that Valentine Malfoy and Agrippina Lestrange and the women they took tea with saw themselves as doing Uncle Cygnus and Aunt Druella a favour in taking their daughters off their hands, with not a word said - in public at least - about any insufficiencies in their dowries. Bella was too much of a bitch. Cissy had tanked her value on the marriage market by having a sister who’d wrapped her lips around a Mudblood’s cock. But they were beautiful, and Lucius was smitten, and Rodolphus was utterly disinterested in spending a long time on finding himself a woman (if the rumours were to be believed), and so the girls had wormed their ways in.

He remembers being shown into some magnificent sitting room or other - Reg marvelling at the ceiling (that’s called a squinch, Sirius, and that’s called an architrave) like a twat - as the house was a bustle of activity. He remembers piles of flowers being carried in, in anticipation of the wedding which would take place the following day, and Cissy sitting - perfect and pure in tiers of muslin - next to her fiancé, who looked as much of a prick as he always did. He remembers his mother - she’d shed her usual black for rose, it washed her out - perching delicately on the chaise beside Mrs Malfoy. He remembers Bella picking with transparent disdain at a cherry cake as the conversation turned to Cissy’s trousseau and her honeymoon in Paris and how romantic Lucius is. Her husband had returned home from their honeymoon a week early. To ‘attend to some business’ with one of the Selwyn boys.

And he remembers - he doesn’t think he’ll ever forget - the way the air changed. All the flowers’ perfume and the scent of cakes and honey and the blowsy humidity of young love vanished, giving way to something as cold and still as the grave.

And all because an elf appeared before Abraxas Malfoy and said that he was to come - and all the rest of them were to come too; the ones, he now knows, who’d let themselves be branded like cattle - to the library at once.