Chapter Text
Sirius Black enjoyed hosting the Order of the Phoenix as much as anyone. After all that time, all of that anger and despair, it let him feel useful for the first time in years. 12 Grimmauld Place had replaced Azkaban as his prison, yes, and freedom came in scraps — seeing Harry laugh in the hallway, a sharp joke that landed, a glass of strong firewhiskey. Small mercies, really, yet mercies nonetheless.
The house had finally quieted down for the night. The meeting had been long resolved, strategy talks turned into tired murmurs, quiet goodbyes and doors closed one by one. Most had gone home, disappearing in the quiet August evening, the rest were preparing for bed. Sirius had stayed behind, listening to the hushed drum of boots up and down stairs, waiting it to quiet down. For as much as he relished at the company of others — proof that he hadn’t become entirely useless — all he wanted tonight was solitude and a drink.
He stepped into the kitchen and he realised he would find neither.
Nymphadora Tonks was slouched at the table, her hair a mess of violet spilling over her shoulders. She was lazily leaning her cheek on one hand, the sleeves of her dreadful yellow jacket in wild contrast to the white marble. Opposite her was crouched another figure, slim and pale, with one hand deep into his mother’s wine cabinet. Her other hand was clutching the neck of a dusty bottle. Her dark eyes were studying the label with an almost transfixed concentration, as though she trying to remember something and the answer was lying between the messy lines.
That one. Nymphadora’s friend.
Sirius leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed across his chest. His voice came out as a dry drawl. “And here I thought I should keep that one for a special occasion.”
Two heads whipped around in a brief startle that quickly dissolving into relief. Dora mumbled something in the likes of I thought you were my mother and the kneeling girl snorted a quiet laugh in response.
She looked up at him, a small, polished smile sliding across her face. Polite, Pureblood smile. “Forgive me,” she said calmly, yet her hands didn’t as much as twitch to return the bottle back where she found it. “We should’ve asked first.”
The calculated insolence made Sirius’ eyes squint. She was threading the fine line between mischief and a kind of entitlement he had come to despise since boyhood. The velvety pose, the cold elegance she carried herself with reminded him of some Merlin-forsaken cousins he used to see all the time.
He wanted to dismiss her as just another pure-blooded snake, but her eyes gave her away. They glinted dark, amused. Alive. No hint at a cold superiority. She was waiting for him to order her to put it back and would delightedly disobey.
Dora broke the standoff when she turned her head around to look at him. “We couldn’t hold back, cousin,” she said with a grin, then nodded at the other girl. “Marian can sniff out all the good ones.”
The other girl, Marian, of course, that was her name, rose and opened the upper cabinet, pulling a third glass out of it. She held it up at him, eyebrow arched in question. Sirius nodded. That’s what I came for after all. He moved to the table, slouching on the empty chair at the short end
Marian slid the cork free with an easy, practiced twist. Every movement was too graceful, too schooled — someone raised for drawing room teas and elegant dinners. Not for nightly raids of a criminal’s kitchen. Merlin, with her long, tight velvet skirt and lace shirt fitted to precision, she looked almost ridiculous next to Nymphadora. Yet, the two seemed to be inseparable, at least for the few times that Sirius had seen her. So close, that even his cousin had vouched for her when it came to her indoctrination into the Order. He remembered a talk they had a few weeks prior. My daughter needs someone to rein her in. Remind her there are consequences. Andromeda had said, lowering her voice. It’s good for her. It’s good for both of them. Marian only really laughs when Dora is around.
Sirius allowed Marian to pour him a generous glass of wine and took a sip. To his surprise, it was sweeter than he expected.
“We were talking about men,” Nymphadora declared suddenly, lifting her glass in mock-salute. Sirius cocked an eyebrow. “Or—” she tilted her head with a crooked smile, eyes flicking to her friend, whose own mouth twitched — “one man in particular.”
“Should I be flattered or concerned?”
“Neither,” Dora laughed. “We were talking about Remus.” She was trying to play it off almost like a joke, but her eyes betrayed the quietest glint of nervousness.
Ah, I see.
“He’s… complicated,” Nymphadora continued, her fingers drawing circles on the rim of her glass.
There isn’t much Sirius could say. Marian’s dark eyes didn’t leave him and he suddenly felt as though he had walked into a trap.
“That’s one word for him.” Moony would rather brood his way to an early grave before he lets a girl in. If they thought he would supply insight into Remus’s feelings, they had picked the wrong target.
“What do you mean ‘complicated’?” Marian chimed in, her voice casual, eyes drifting to the ceiling as if something terribly interesting was happening there. Too casual.
Sirius smirked. “Nice try.”
Her lips curved faintly. “I just want to make sure there are no miscommunications.”
Amused, Sirius noted the faint blush on her cheeks, the only indication she had been drinking. Strange. He had only seen this one quiet, polite, speaking mostly when she had to give a report about some soirée she had attended. And Sirius wasn’t usually paying attention to these ones. He never pictured her gossiping with Dora, cheeks flushed, circling in length whether Remus as much as looked her way.
Sirius shoved that thought aside, annoyed with himself.
“If you want to know something about Remus,” he said firmly, “you’ll have to ask him yourself.”
Dora huffed, downing her whole glass in one go and gave him a pointed look. “Hardly helpful.”
“We’re all adults, I suppose.” Marian spoke softly. His eyes glanced at her. “You should be able to talk to him.”
Sirius startled lightly at that. Adults. Andromeda’s own daughter — a grown woman, already halved her twenties. And him, more than a decade older, yet still a boy, locked in his mother’s house. The thought made him dizzy.
Dora drummed her fingers against the stool of her wineglass. The words seemed to push her buttons though, because she tossed back the rest of her wine and scraped her stool away from the table.
“Alright. I’ll — I’ll just go to bed. Before I do something stupid.”
She tried to make it sound light, but she couldn’t hide the strain in her voice. Sirius listened to the uneven rhythm of her footsteps, followed by the soft creak of her door. The kitchen fell awfully quiet, like the house swallowed her very presence.
To his surprise, Marian didn’t follow her friend. He heard Nymphadora’s door shut with a thud upstairs, and his grey eyes flicked to the witch that had stayed. She didn’t move but for a quiet sip of her wine.
His eyes fell to her hands, to something he had noticed from the day she had walked into Grimmauld Place. The silver rings that were stacked over her fingers, glinting in the firelight. He counted against his will. Five, six… seven. Many, far too many.
Sirius frowned. A respectable pureblood daughter would wear one, maybe two delicate bands, picked carefully, discreet. Marian looked like a child that had rummaged through her mother’s jewellery box, picking out the biggest, heaviest ones that first caught her attention. Defiant in a way, if one squinted their eyes.
Maybe it was the wine speaking, but that stirred something in him, something angry, annoyed and raw. He wanted to take them off one by one, just to make that delicate hand stop looking like an armoured glove. You’re staring. Stop staring.
“Just talk to him?” He taunted suddenly, the words slipping out before he could stop them. He wasn’t not even sure why, but the call to bark at her was stronger and way faster than any afterthought. The way she sat there, polished and patient, a perfect pale decor in the coldness of this Merlin forsaken house. “Is that how you worked this out at home?” At your Deatheater home.
To his misfortune, Marian didn’t take the bait. No snarky bite-back, even though her lips pursed slightly, like his comment did land. Maybe it was harsh, he thought for a moment, if she is here, she likely isn’t on great terms with her pureblood family.
“It’s still better than her keeping it in,” she said finally, taking a long sip of her glass. Probably hurrying to finish it quickly, so she wouldn’t have to keep sharing his wonderful company. Good. “Silence only makes you rot inside.”
The wine burned at the back of his throat. Just like this bloody tomb. He had only meant to nudge her, irritate her until the calm polite facade cracked and she let that little forked tongue loose. Yet he knew. The quiet rot that had settled like the layers of dust in Grimmauld Place, all those words left unsaid at family dinners what seemed like centuries ago. Like Marian knew exactly the kind of rot places like that brought with them. For a second, Sirius struggled with the sneer slipping from his mouth and that annoyed him more than her poise.
He swallowed hard and smirked, doing his best to cover the twist in his chest. “How poetic. Put that on a tapestry.”
This time she finally snorted, moving her eyes to the cabinets, as if there was something exceptionally interesting about the kitchen set-up. A small, bitter smile slipped on her face and maybe the wine had finally hit her, because her next words barely made sense. “Maybe I should. If we had the bloody guts to talk about things, not listen to Fudge and whisper ‘You-know-who’ like frightened children, we wouldn’t be here at all.”
His eyebrows shot up. He hadn’t expected that, not the contempt in her voice. Her mouth tightened as if she’d bitten back something sharp and suddenly remembered where she was. Not fear. Not sadness. More like a truth that slipped by accident. Sirius tried to quickly go through what he knew about Marian. Since she was present at order meetings, she was giving reports on Ministry business, mostly. He was about to make a jab about the unbeknownst wonders of Slytherin bravery, yet it died before it left his lips.
Marian sighed and crossed her hands across her chest, her eyes turning to the cupboards. Her gaze was somewhere far away. “I’m not trying to lecture you on how they botched it. You of all people.” Her eyes moved back to him, the corner of her mouth tugging into a cynical smile, as if she just realised the irony. “Just a crap day at work.”
Sirius watched her for a long moment, trying to weigh in what she had just said. She wasn’t drunk, no. Her words were too sharp for that. But she had let a sharp edge show and that startled him more than Dora’s crush.
“Happy to help,” he mumbled, because he didn’t know what else to say. “Get yourself another bottle, if it’ll make it better.”
Marian snorted, shaking her head. “Hardly better.“ She shifted in her chair, raising one of her feet to rest it on her seat. Her position made her skirt climb up her leg and gave Sirius a view of the pale skin of her calf and where it disappeared in her leather boot. “Besides, you wouldn’t want the reputation of corrupting respectable witches added to your list of offences.”
“Respectable?” He barked a laugh. “You have been crawling through cabinets and drinking stolen liquor.”
“By Ministry standards,” she clarified smoothly. “Which, as I already cleared, are very low.”
The words made him snort a laugh despite himself. He took the bottle and poured himself what was left of the wine. It was his own bottle, for Merlin’s sake. “You keep talking about the Ministry. What is it even that you do? Drinking tea all day to avoid bureaucracy?”
Her mouth twitched. “On the contrary.” She leaned forward and her smile turned conspiratorial. “I love bureaucracy.”
Sirius nearly spat out his wine. “You what?!” Hardly a sentence he had expected to ever hear from a member of the Order.
“Bureaucracy,” she repeated, and her usually cold eyes flashed with amusement, like he had finally gotten the pun of a joke she had told ages ago. She twirled the wine glass and he saw a smudge of ink on the pad of her forefinger. “All those files, all those stacks of parchment — push the right forms to the right desks and you can move mountains.”
He snorted in disbelief. “Disgusting.” The thought of meek Ministry clerks with watery eyes fumbling papers made him sick. It made him even sicker to admit she was right, so he didn’t.
The smile that slipped on her face was almost dreamy, but her eyes were wolfish. “I love doing interceptions,” she admitted. “Some poor sod sees Moody in a place he dos think he should be, writes it down, sends it down the chain… and it finds its way to my desk. And stays there. Days, weeks… by the time someone remembers it — “
“It’s ancient history.” Sirius felt his lips twitch against his will. Her words had scratched an itch he didn’t expect to be scratched, let alone by her. “Petty sabotage,” he grinned and he hated the purr he heard in his voice.
A wide, conspiratorial smile slithered its way to her face, wicked and… genuine. Marian leaned back, tapping her rings against the stool of the glass and it dawns on Sirius that it’s the first time he had ever seen her smile. “Or I slide the right reports where they should go. A suspicious gathering at Knockturn? If I’m careful, it goes straight to Shaklebolt’s desk without anyone realising who nudged it.”
“So your grand rebellion is at a desk?”
She snorted. “I never said it was grand. Or that it was a rebellion.” She shrugged her shoulders. “But it works.”
Sirius didn’t bite back on that, even though he could. He looked at her properly instead — the dark fall of her hair, straight and immaculate, her clothes that looked like they were sewn into her. Then the rings, heavy and mismatched, the flushed on her cheeks that betrayed the wine in her blood. Not respectable, not really. No — something else.
Get a grip, Black.
He shoved whatever it was that made him look down and did the best he could in the past few months. He called the boyish smirk to his face, as if he had accio-ed it on his lips and raised his glass to her in a salute that didn’t quite have the mocking edge he tried to force.
“So be it, Marian. To petty sabotage.”
She tilted her head, reaching to meet his glass. For a moment, it almost felt easy — the quiet truce that could only be born from too much drink at late hours. Before he could hear the quiet clink of the glass, the air shifted.
A wave of light spilled from the kitchen door, silver and blinding. The shape gathered itself above their heads — a lynx, swift and soundless. Its mouth opened and Kingsley Shaklebolt’s voice rang in the room.
“Dementor attack. At Little Whinging.” The Patronus blinked out, leaving only an echo behind.
Sirius felt the room tilt. The fear climbed the back of his neck in a thin, icy thread, the same way is always did before, in the dark, just as he felt the guards were about to come. He tried to breathe in, but he could only smell rot and damp and sea.
“Dementors,” he repeated, and the sound barely left his throat. The alcohol was gone from his system, burned away by panic.
Harry.