wip clearing
Oct. 11th, 2013 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toujours_nigelSo there's this thing that brownbetty calls feral wips in her journal, and I don't have that, exactly, but I *do* have a bunch that was going to be stuff but now is just sitting in my hard-drive and has been for over a year, *sigh* posting because.
The thing is, Steve’s not a pansy. Oh, he sure as hell looks the part right now, perched in the window-seat staring out at the street, fine hair neatly combed and eyes flicking from his sketch-book out through the little rectangular panes. But there’s the damned catch: ‘right now’, when he’s sat at home trying to make sure he’s got his perspectives right by drawing the lone tree outside the Jamesons’ shop a hundred different ways; take him outside and he puts on a strut that’d seem theatrical on a man a half-foot taller. Bucky should know, he’s got those six inches and his own Irish swagger and even he looks like the sort of actor that gets rotten eggs pelted at the screen: he’s only ever seen the likes of Laurence Olivier to carry it off; it’s the sort of thing that needs a battalion to make good on its promises. On Skinny Steve it just looks comedic; it’s half of what gets him beaten to pulp every other day: there’s no man who likes a half-grown punk ...
Bucky says, “They really did a number on you, huh, kid?” and, “Well, budge over, Rogers, you've about enough room to fit a football team on there.”
“I'll be fine.” He doesn't even much remember falling asleep, but that's usually the case—he heals fast and largely without medical intervention, but severe injury—or what would be severe injury for unenhanced humans—tends to render him practically comatose.
“Could hear you screaming all the way over in my room, so just shut up and scoot, will you?” Bucky's using what Steve calls his Pneumonia Voice, the one that used to get brought out every time he was ill and Bucky was pretending not to panic. He scoots.
Bucky settles warm against his side, dragging up the bedclothes he's kicked down in his sleep. It's familiar enough it's a bit of a shock that Bucky's smaller than him; they didn't much do this in the army, though there was that time just outside Dieppe. “Natasha?”
“Coulson's debriefing her and Barton. Now get some sleep before Stark decides to break and enter for shits and giggles.”
“Tony's here too?” Bucky refuses to answer, rolls over and breathes like he's fast asleep, like Steve won't know he's lying there with his eyes open, staring at the wall. His shoulder still hurts from being thrown into the wall—by a sentient gorilla, for Chrissakes—and it's enormously frustrating to have to stay still and quiet in the breathing darkness. He finds himself beginning to breathe in time with Bucky.
His kitchen is a huge affair that could have comfortably held the flat he and Bucky had shared back before the War. It’s still smaller than the common kitchen in their headquarters, which is a steel and chrome affair that sometimes hurts his eyes to look at.
The queen woke at cock-light. Far below, on the Pella plain, soldiers were already whirling through manoeuvres while her husband’s generals looked them over with a critical eye. In his rooms, her son was waking from his first sleep beside a woman since she’d denied him her bed, and in hers the snakes were slithering into the warm burrow her absent body had created beneath the furs. The maids were asleep in the little room that opened from hers, and in the cedar chair by the hearth Hyrmina was dozing, her black hair ruddy in the dying light.
She had sat out the night watching the leaping flames—the store of bark and dry twigs had run low, and the room had the closeness of winter about it, and a scent of charred wood—her feet were resting on the loose stone, beneath which Philip’s vaunted rationality had driven Olympias’ magic phials and charms, and she stirred in her sleep as if to shake away dreams.
Olympias herself had slept undisturbed and had dreamt dreams that left her smiling in her sleep; now she put a hand in Hyrmina’s hair, and felt oddly tender about her friend. They had been together from girlhood, and Hyrmina had been richly rewarded for it; there was nobody who knew as much about the queen as her, and nobody who was trusted as well.
She turned her head, still half in sleep, and brushed a kiss to the hand tangled in her curls, and woke quite suddenly, startling from a dream. “You’ll catch your death of cold walking around in your skin like that. Where’s your night-robe?” She looked around for it, blinking sleep from her eyes.
Olympias laughed. “I threw it out of the window. When did the girl come back? You should have woken me.” The fire spluttered and Hyrmina knelt hastily to tend it. “What did she say?”
The flames leaped up, darkening the Trojan blood on the wall opposite; Hyrmina, getting up, braced a hand ungently on Olympias’s hip. “Your skin is cold to the touch. Did you really throw it out? I’ll get a cover from the bed if you have. Sit by the fire, at least.”
“It’s where it is always. He rarely sleeps so late.” He came to her rooms some mornings smelling of dust and grass and the clean sweat of exercise, his face shining with the joy of effort.
“He rarely has a girl warming his bed. She wasn’t bad, for a maiden. Perhaps he liked her.”
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
When I was a child I thought I was a Prince.
The only children who do not play at being royalty are those who already are; they simply play at the future. All others do. Even the children of scavengers and young hunters in the deep forests seek to become lord of all they survey, in play if nowhere else.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
The door to her flat doesn’t give Kay pause, as Julia has been half-afraid it would. She hands her out of the cab quite briskly, and insists on paying the fare herself while Julia works the door open as noiselessly as she can manage. Her gloves are slippery and pose some initial problems, but the door compensates by opening without any tell-tale creaks. To have her neighbours come up the stairs right now would be inconvenient. She can’t remember whether it’s her time for the bathroom or theirs, and doesn’t have a watch on her to check.
Alec did not contact him on behalf of Laurie the next day. It might have been for a thousand different reasons, and Ralph was, for once, content not to query.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
And there's this one, which is definitely going to progress, dammit. but hasn't in a while, so.
Sirius, with his usual splendid knack for inconvenient timing, wakes seven days after Harry’s arrival, three days before the second full of July. At midnight, no less, an hour after the twins have cheerfully ousted him from his chair outside the Ward and about ten minutes after he’s crawled into bed. At least, he thinks while failing to locate his trousers, at least they’ve been keeping watch round the clock for the last two days, after Agron had told them it might be important for Sirius to see a familiar face upon first awakening: he will almost certainly be disoriented, and nobody wants to risk sedating him again.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Fred urges from the fireplace. “George is distracting the Mediwitch, but I think she’s onto him, just come through, will you? Can’t hold this open much longer.”
He stumbles into St. Mungo’s fifth-floor cafeteria in an undershirt and orange trousers he’d been blissfully unaware of owning, just in time to be hustled down the corridor and the staircase by Fred Weasley, to the distant sound of sensible heels in pursuit.
Dasgupta looks at him wide-eyed. “That was fast.”
“Yes, it was, wasn’t it? Not quite one of our better efforts, but it got the job done, so no complaints there. I’m going to go tell Harry and the others, George’s a bit tied-up at the moment. Ta, Lupin.”
“I’ve no excuses for him,” Remus says after Fred’s pelted back down the corridor.
Dasgupta shrugs, and then it’s terrible and still, the sound of the patients’ breathing loud in the night over their muted steps. Sirius is nowhere to be seen.
“We put him in a room of his own, just off Janus Thickey. Rumour has it he’s about to get a number of visitors, and I’d rather not have the other patients disturbed. He doesn’t seem to need looking after, but I’ll be right here all night, so that should be alright. Well, here we are.”
The room in which they have Sirius is small and off to one side, hidden where Janus Thickey abuts the wall, curtained and plush: clearly someone’s office that she’s transfigured into a temporary ward, to judge from the Healers’ portraits on the wall. When he asks her about it, Dasgupta shrugs elaborately and closes the door behind him.
And then he has little thought to spare for possible infarctions of Hospital rules. Sirius is stirring, in the bed beside the window, and struggling to sit up. In later days he will never remember how he gets across the room, but next he knows Remus is perched on the edge of the bed, one arm beneath Sirius’ shoulders and helping him sit up. Sirius smiles at him, tips his head at the carafe of water on the bedside table. He can only manage to drink a very little, with great care, but it seems to ease him enough to settle contentedly back into bed.
Remus, awkward and edging away, moves to claim the armchair beside the bed, clears his throat and says, “Harry will be here any minute; Fred Weasley went to call him.”
“Good lad,” Sirius says, and takes a shuddering breath. “How long?”
“Two months next week. We thought you were going to be here forever.”
“Longbottoms.”
“Yes, like Frank and Alice. You saved their son, you know.”
“Nearchus.”
“Neville, Padders. He’s with Harry in Gryffindor.” He’s heard of people losing their memory after being asleep for days, and Sirius with the fissures Azkaban has made in him, is a better target than most.
“Tonks?”
“She was injured but she’s fine. Molly Weasley wants her to marry Bill. You remember Bill, titchy little first year who used to care for Prongs’ Quidditch gear. They’re all fine, Sirius, Harry and Hermione and the Weasleys.”
Sirius nods, blinks his eyes shut and settles deeper into his pillows, frowning. “Am I... Azkaban. Am I going back?’
“You’re not.” And it is the best pleasure of his life to be able to tell Sirius this. “You’re free, you’ve been exonerated.”
Sirius. Merlin. Sirius melts at that, eyes falling open and startled, body relaxing bonelessly. “Moony,” he says, and again, in wonderment, “Moony.”
“You’re a free man, Sirius Black,” and then, because the joy in Sirius’ eyes is indecent, he looks away and laughs a little at the furnishings. “And your nubile young Healer I suspect has a crush on you.”
“Yes,” Sirius says sardonically, and waits till he looks up before gesturing at himself. “I am the subject of every young woman’s dream.”
He looks a right mess, to be honest. His ratty hair has been tied away from his face but the beard still covers most of it, and what can be seen of his cheeks is hollowed out and his eyes are sunken. Remus knows from experience how painfully light he has grown, how his skeleton is birdlike held in both arms. Nothing but pallid skin stretched over fine bones, Sirius Black, who used to be beautiful enough to make you cry.
“Well,” Remus says, judiciously, eyeing the distance between the bed and the armchair, “maybe she has a fetish for sickly middle-aged men. These things do happen.”
Sirius doesn’t even break stride. “You’d know, Moony, that’s how you manage to get your rocks off.”
At this point he is, of course, obliged to retaliate in some fashion, and Sirius is saved from being squashed under a pillow only by the timely arrival of the Weasleys.
And Harry, who pushes past them all to get to Sirius. Remus makes it out of the armchair barely in time, and then realises he might as well not have bothered.
Harry climbs into bed with Sirius, hands clenched into his hospital robes, and face buried against the bony jut of his shoulder. Sirius stares up at him, face open and bewildered, and then looks at Molly, who is standing in the doorway with a storm gathering in her face. He wraps both arms around the boy and tucks him closer.
Molly takes three decisive steps into the room, brushing past Ginny and Hermione. It unlocks something in Remus, and he moves forward, herding Ron ahead of him, and then the girls. Behind him Harry has begun talking to Sirius, in a frantic murmur that Sirius is failing to hush.
He smiles at Molly in his most ingratiating manner. “I think we should go get some tea, don’t you? I barely had any dinner.”
Molly glances at him, and then over his shoulder at the bed, and tuts sharply. “I don’t think...”
“I’m pretty hungry,” Ron says, and Ginny and Hermione nod vigorously.
“Good, it’s settled, then.” He takes Molly’s arm. “How’s Arthur?”
Arthur, it transpires, is doing quite well, if still inevitably busy. Everyone is as well as can be expected, though the house, Molly makes it a point to inform him, is rather full due to the addition of Fleur Delacour, Bill’s French girlfriend. The girls giggle when she is mentioned, and Ginny scowls at Ron, who is blushing lightly. Ah, teenagers; he misses it like he misses the full.
“Actually we’ve just had a bit of excitement,” Molly says, eventually. “The children got their O.W.L.S results this morning.”
“Hermione topped everything, of course,” Ginny grins.
Hermione, predictably, colours and hangs her head. “I didn’t. I got one ‘E’, and I’m sure Padma’s got all ‘O’s.”
“How many subjects did you take?”
“Ten.”
“She got nine ‘O’s,” Ron says, “and she’s actually disappointed about that one ‘E’. Daft.”
Remus, well, he recognises the feeling, not so much in himself as in his memory of Sirius sulking because he hadn’t managed to top the class in Potions, nevermind that everyone had accepted that the true contest there was between Lily and Severus, and nevermind that Sirius had skived off classes several times in his eagerness to avoid Slughorn. He ducks his head to meet her eye, and says, “Nine ‘O’s is a wonderful haul, you know. I only ever managed seven.”
In a very small voice, Hermione admits, “The ‘E’ is in Defence Against the Dark Arts. I’m sorry, Professor.”
He hasn’t taught her in two years, but he’s man enough to admit how wonderful that word is from a student with as much passion for learning as Hermione. “And the worst part is you can’t ask the examiners where you erred, I’ve always thought.”
“Yes! It’s really not fair,” she says. “I deserve to learn from my mistakes.” Molly is sighing at them, and Ron and Ginny, when he glances up, are rolling their eyes in an eerily synchronised move.
“I know,” he says, “that all of you wanted to see Sirius, but he’s barely woken, and I don’t think the excitement’s good for him.” He is sincerely sorry for it, because Hermione and Ron, with their usual attitude towards all Harry’s possessions, regard Sirius as as good as their own; at least it isn’t the twins, who he does not think he would have had the heart to turn away.
Molly, gathering up her children, offers to take Harry along with them, but neither of them can even contemplate for any length the thought of separating the two. It hurts Molly, he thinks, in some unreachable, unreasonable depth of her soul, to know that Harry does not think solely of her and Arthur as his parents, but it is a lovelier fate than many, to suffer from an excess of love.
When he gets back to the fourth floor, Dasgupta’s dozing lightly, her face squashed against a novel. In his private room, Sirius is lying on his side, curled around Harry, moonlight falling on both their faces: Harry looks young and tired in the way only children are, through an exertion of every faculty without reservation. He thinks that they are both asleep, and is very quiet coming in: they have—or, he suspects, Harry has—enlarged the bed to the size of a four-poster and there is scarcely any space. When he was at Hogwarts, all of them had had the tendency to pile into one bed after the full, but he shudders to think what the Healers or Weasleys would make of it, and he’s slept in worse places than the plush armchair beside the bed.
When he has all but fallen asleep, Sirius wakens to growl, “Morgan’s tits, man, are you a wizard or not,” and tosses him Harry’s wand.
The room is, upon examination, just big enough to fit an extra cot into.
brownbetty calls feral wips in her journal, and I don't have that, exactly, but I *do* have a bunch that was going to be stuff but now is just sitting in my hard-drive and has been for over a year, *sigh* posting because.The thing is, Steve’s not a pansy. Oh, he sure as hell looks the part right now, perched in the window-seat staring out at the street, fine hair neatly combed and eyes flicking from his sketch-book out through the little rectangular panes. But there’s the damned catch: ‘right now’, when he’s sat at home trying to make sure he’s got his perspectives right by drawing the lone tree outside the Jamesons’ shop a hundred different ways; take him outside and he puts on a strut that’d seem theatrical on a man a half-foot taller. Bucky should know, he’s got those six inches and his own Irish swagger and even he looks like the sort of actor that gets rotten eggs pelted at the screen: he’s only ever seen the likes of Laurence Olivier to carry it off; it’s the sort of thing that needs a battalion to make good on its promises. On Skinny Steve it just looks comedic; it’s half of what gets him beaten to pulp every other day: there’s no man who likes a half-grown punk ...
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
Bucky says, “They really did a number on you, huh, kid?” and, “Well, budge over, Rogers, you've about enough room to fit a football team on there.”
“I'll be fine.” He doesn't even much remember falling asleep, but that's usually the case—he heals fast and largely without medical intervention, but severe injury—or what would be severe injury for unenhanced humans—tends to render him practically comatose.
“Could hear you screaming all the way over in my room, so just shut up and scoot, will you?” Bucky's using what Steve calls his Pneumonia Voice, the one that used to get brought out every time he was ill and Bucky was pretending not to panic. He scoots.
Bucky settles warm against his side, dragging up the bedclothes he's kicked down in his sleep. It's familiar enough it's a bit of a shock that Bucky's smaller than him; they didn't much do this in the army, though there was that time just outside Dieppe. “Natasha?”
“Coulson's debriefing her and Barton. Now get some sleep before Stark decides to break and enter for shits and giggles.”
“Tony's here too?” Bucky refuses to answer, rolls over and breathes like he's fast asleep, like Steve won't know he's lying there with his eyes open, staring at the wall. His shoulder still hurts from being thrown into the wall—by a sentient gorilla, for Chrissakes—and it's enormously frustrating to have to stay still and quiet in the breathing darkness. He finds himself beginning to breathe in time with Bucky.
His kitchen is a huge affair that could have comfortably held the flat he and Bucky had shared back before the War. It’s still smaller than the common kitchen in their headquarters, which is a steel and chrome affair that sometimes hurts his eyes to look at.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
The queen woke at cock-light. Far below, on the Pella plain, soldiers were already whirling through manoeuvres while her husband’s generals looked them over with a critical eye. In his rooms, her son was waking from his first sleep beside a woman since she’d denied him her bed, and in hers the snakes were slithering into the warm burrow her absent body had created beneath the furs. The maids were asleep in the little room that opened from hers, and in the cedar chair by the hearth Hyrmina was dozing, her black hair ruddy in the dying light.
She had sat out the night watching the leaping flames—the store of bark and dry twigs had run low, and the room had the closeness of winter about it, and a scent of charred wood—her feet were resting on the loose stone, beneath which Philip’s vaunted rationality had driven Olympias’ magic phials and charms, and she stirred in her sleep as if to shake away dreams.
Olympias herself had slept undisturbed and had dreamt dreams that left her smiling in her sleep; now she put a hand in Hyrmina’s hair, and felt oddly tender about her friend. They had been together from girlhood, and Hyrmina had been richly rewarded for it; there was nobody who knew as much about the queen as her, and nobody who was trusted as well.
She turned her head, still half in sleep, and brushed a kiss to the hand tangled in her curls, and woke quite suddenly, startling from a dream. “You’ll catch your death of cold walking around in your skin like that. Where’s your night-robe?” She looked around for it, blinking sleep from her eyes.
Olympias laughed. “I threw it out of the window. When did the girl come back? You should have woken me.” The fire spluttered and Hyrmina knelt hastily to tend it. “What did she say?”
The flames leaped up, darkening the Trojan blood on the wall opposite; Hyrmina, getting up, braced a hand ungently on Olympias’s hip. “Your skin is cold to the touch. Did you really throw it out? I’ll get a cover from the bed if you have. Sit by the fire, at least.”
“It’s where it is always. He rarely sleeps so late.” He came to her rooms some mornings smelling of dust and grass and the clean sweat of exercise, his face shining with the joy of effort.
“He rarely has a girl warming his bed. She wasn’t bad, for a maiden. Perhaps he liked her.”
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
When I was a child I thought I was a Prince.
The only children who do not play at being royalty are those who already are; they simply play at the future. All others do. Even the children of scavengers and young hunters in the deep forests seek to become lord of all they survey, in play if nowhere else.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
The door to her flat doesn’t give Kay pause, as Julia has been half-afraid it would. She hands her out of the cab quite briskly, and insists on paying the fare herself while Julia works the door open as noiselessly as she can manage. Her gloves are slippery and pose some initial problems, but the door compensates by opening without any tell-tale creaks. To have her neighbours come up the stairs right now would be inconvenient. She can’t remember whether it’s her time for the bathroom or theirs, and doesn’t have a watch on her to check.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
Alec did not contact him on behalf of Laurie the next day. It might have been for a thousand different reasons, and Ralph was, for once, content not to query.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
And there's this one, which is definitely going to progress, dammit. but hasn't in a while, so.
Sirius, with his usual splendid knack for inconvenient timing, wakes seven days after Harry’s arrival, three days before the second full of July. At midnight, no less, an hour after the twins have cheerfully ousted him from his chair outside the Ward and about ten minutes after he’s crawled into bed. At least, he thinks while failing to locate his trousers, at least they’ve been keeping watch round the clock for the last two days, after Agron had told them it might be important for Sirius to see a familiar face upon first awakening: he will almost certainly be disoriented, and nobody wants to risk sedating him again.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Fred urges from the fireplace. “George is distracting the Mediwitch, but I think she’s onto him, just come through, will you? Can’t hold this open much longer.”
He stumbles into St. Mungo’s fifth-floor cafeteria in an undershirt and orange trousers he’d been blissfully unaware of owning, just in time to be hustled down the corridor and the staircase by Fred Weasley, to the distant sound of sensible heels in pursuit.
Dasgupta looks at him wide-eyed. “That was fast.”
“Yes, it was, wasn’t it? Not quite one of our better efforts, but it got the job done, so no complaints there. I’m going to go tell Harry and the others, George’s a bit tied-up at the moment. Ta, Lupin.”
“I’ve no excuses for him,” Remus says after Fred’s pelted back down the corridor.
Dasgupta shrugs, and then it’s terrible and still, the sound of the patients’ breathing loud in the night over their muted steps. Sirius is nowhere to be seen.
“We put him in a room of his own, just off Janus Thickey. Rumour has it he’s about to get a number of visitors, and I’d rather not have the other patients disturbed. He doesn’t seem to need looking after, but I’ll be right here all night, so that should be alright. Well, here we are.”
The room in which they have Sirius is small and off to one side, hidden where Janus Thickey abuts the wall, curtained and plush: clearly someone’s office that she’s transfigured into a temporary ward, to judge from the Healers’ portraits on the wall. When he asks her about it, Dasgupta shrugs elaborately and closes the door behind him.
And then he has little thought to spare for possible infarctions of Hospital rules. Sirius is stirring, in the bed beside the window, and struggling to sit up. In later days he will never remember how he gets across the room, but next he knows Remus is perched on the edge of the bed, one arm beneath Sirius’ shoulders and helping him sit up. Sirius smiles at him, tips his head at the carafe of water on the bedside table. He can only manage to drink a very little, with great care, but it seems to ease him enough to settle contentedly back into bed.
Remus, awkward and edging away, moves to claim the armchair beside the bed, clears his throat and says, “Harry will be here any minute; Fred Weasley went to call him.”
“Good lad,” Sirius says, and takes a shuddering breath. “How long?”
“Two months next week. We thought you were going to be here forever.”
“Longbottoms.”
“Yes, like Frank and Alice. You saved their son, you know.”
“Nearchus.”
“Neville, Padders. He’s with Harry in Gryffindor.” He’s heard of people losing their memory after being asleep for days, and Sirius with the fissures Azkaban has made in him, is a better target than most.
“Tonks?”
“She was injured but she’s fine. Molly Weasley wants her to marry Bill. You remember Bill, titchy little first year who used to care for Prongs’ Quidditch gear. They’re all fine, Sirius, Harry and Hermione and the Weasleys.”
Sirius nods, blinks his eyes shut and settles deeper into his pillows, frowning. “Am I... Azkaban. Am I going back?’
“You’re not.” And it is the best pleasure of his life to be able to tell Sirius this. “You’re free, you’ve been exonerated.”
Sirius. Merlin. Sirius melts at that, eyes falling open and startled, body relaxing bonelessly. “Moony,” he says, and again, in wonderment, “Moony.”
“You’re a free man, Sirius Black,” and then, because the joy in Sirius’ eyes is indecent, he looks away and laughs a little at the furnishings. “And your nubile young Healer I suspect has a crush on you.”
“Yes,” Sirius says sardonically, and waits till he looks up before gesturing at himself. “I am the subject of every young woman’s dream.”
He looks a right mess, to be honest. His ratty hair has been tied away from his face but the beard still covers most of it, and what can be seen of his cheeks is hollowed out and his eyes are sunken. Remus knows from experience how painfully light he has grown, how his skeleton is birdlike held in both arms. Nothing but pallid skin stretched over fine bones, Sirius Black, who used to be beautiful enough to make you cry.
“Well,” Remus says, judiciously, eyeing the distance between the bed and the armchair, “maybe she has a fetish for sickly middle-aged men. These things do happen.”
Sirius doesn’t even break stride. “You’d know, Moony, that’s how you manage to get your rocks off.”
At this point he is, of course, obliged to retaliate in some fashion, and Sirius is saved from being squashed under a pillow only by the timely arrival of the Weasleys.
And Harry, who pushes past them all to get to Sirius. Remus makes it out of the armchair barely in time, and then realises he might as well not have bothered.
Harry climbs into bed with Sirius, hands clenched into his hospital robes, and face buried against the bony jut of his shoulder. Sirius stares up at him, face open and bewildered, and then looks at Molly, who is standing in the doorway with a storm gathering in her face. He wraps both arms around the boy and tucks him closer.
Molly takes three decisive steps into the room, brushing past Ginny and Hermione. It unlocks something in Remus, and he moves forward, herding Ron ahead of him, and then the girls. Behind him Harry has begun talking to Sirius, in a frantic murmur that Sirius is failing to hush.
He smiles at Molly in his most ingratiating manner. “I think we should go get some tea, don’t you? I barely had any dinner.”
Molly glances at him, and then over his shoulder at the bed, and tuts sharply. “I don’t think...”
“I’m pretty hungry,” Ron says, and Ginny and Hermione nod vigorously.
“Good, it’s settled, then.” He takes Molly’s arm. “How’s Arthur?”
Arthur, it transpires, is doing quite well, if still inevitably busy. Everyone is as well as can be expected, though the house, Molly makes it a point to inform him, is rather full due to the addition of Fleur Delacour, Bill’s French girlfriend. The girls giggle when she is mentioned, and Ginny scowls at Ron, who is blushing lightly. Ah, teenagers; he misses it like he misses the full.
“Actually we’ve just had a bit of excitement,” Molly says, eventually. “The children got their O.W.L.S results this morning.”
“Hermione topped everything, of course,” Ginny grins.
Hermione, predictably, colours and hangs her head. “I didn’t. I got one ‘E’, and I’m sure Padma’s got all ‘O’s.”
“How many subjects did you take?”
“Ten.”
“She got nine ‘O’s,” Ron says, “and she’s actually disappointed about that one ‘E’. Daft.”
Remus, well, he recognises the feeling, not so much in himself as in his memory of Sirius sulking because he hadn’t managed to top the class in Potions, nevermind that everyone had accepted that the true contest there was between Lily and Severus, and nevermind that Sirius had skived off classes several times in his eagerness to avoid Slughorn. He ducks his head to meet her eye, and says, “Nine ‘O’s is a wonderful haul, you know. I only ever managed seven.”
In a very small voice, Hermione admits, “The ‘E’ is in Defence Against the Dark Arts. I’m sorry, Professor.”
He hasn’t taught her in two years, but he’s man enough to admit how wonderful that word is from a student with as much passion for learning as Hermione. “And the worst part is you can’t ask the examiners where you erred, I’ve always thought.”
“Yes! It’s really not fair,” she says. “I deserve to learn from my mistakes.” Molly is sighing at them, and Ron and Ginny, when he glances up, are rolling their eyes in an eerily synchronised move.
“I know,” he says, “that all of you wanted to see Sirius, but he’s barely woken, and I don’t think the excitement’s good for him.” He is sincerely sorry for it, because Hermione and Ron, with their usual attitude towards all Harry’s possessions, regard Sirius as as good as their own; at least it isn’t the twins, who he does not think he would have had the heart to turn away.
Molly, gathering up her children, offers to take Harry along with them, but neither of them can even contemplate for any length the thought of separating the two. It hurts Molly, he thinks, in some unreachable, unreasonable depth of her soul, to know that Harry does not think solely of her and Arthur as his parents, but it is a lovelier fate than many, to suffer from an excess of love.
When he gets back to the fourth floor, Dasgupta’s dozing lightly, her face squashed against a novel. In his private room, Sirius is lying on his side, curled around Harry, moonlight falling on both their faces: Harry looks young and tired in the way only children are, through an exertion of every faculty without reservation. He thinks that they are both asleep, and is very quiet coming in: they have—or, he suspects, Harry has—enlarged the bed to the size of a four-poster and there is scarcely any space. When he was at Hogwarts, all of them had had the tendency to pile into one bed after the full, but he shudders to think what the Healers or Weasleys would make of it, and he’s slept in worse places than the plush armchair beside the bed.
When he has all but fallen asleep, Sirius wakens to growl, “Morgan’s tits, man, are you a wizard or not,” and tosses him Harry’s wand.
The room is, upon examination, just big enough to fit an extra cot into.
