Chapter 41: Ch-ch-ch-changes
Elated by his encounter with Hermione, Remus bound into his dormitory, throwing the door wide and proclaiming loudly for all the residents to hear: "My girlfriend does not want to snog her brother!"
"That isn't something you hear every day," Peter commented, a look of concern taking over his cherubic features. "I think I might have missed something."
"No worries," Remus grinned. "All a misunderstanding, but it boils down to Sirius being an idiot and a jealous one at that."
Peter snorted while Remus sharpened his tongue for the verbal brawl that was sure to follow such a blatant smear to Sirius's carefully maintained persona of absolute cool. He waited, but nothing came. The smile dropped off his face when Sirius made no reply, defence or rebuttal. He looked over at the silent Animagus and saw the normally boisterous young man crumpled on his bed, staring unseeing at his Operation Not-Prongs parchment. He had not heard a single word Remus had said.
He prodded the despondent boy in the arm. "Problems, Mr Padfoot?"
"More than you'll ever know," he muttered.
"Cheer up," Remus ordered. "Hermione doesn't fancy Harry. I'm certain he doesn't fancy her. Whatever you overheard is complete bollocks. He's still all yours."
Sirius didn't look up from his parchment, but this time Remus was certain that his friend had heard him. His response was so far from anything he had expected, however, that he recoiled as the pained laugh forced its way from the boy's throat, grating on his ears and heart. "All mine. Hardly," Sirius spat and tore the list in half.
"Oi! We worked hard on that!" Remus protested, lunging to grab the damaged list from him before he could destroy it completely.
He had no idea what Sirius was on about, but he knew that Harry and his secret were the most important extracurriculars the boy had ever taken up, more important than Quidditch or learning to ride the motorbike he had kept hidden in the Potter's garden shed for the past two years. Sirius made no move to keep him from the list, but his face was enough to stop his attempt to take it. He looked beyond horrid, pale and gaunt with eyes so bloodshot Remus actually thought he might have been crying, something which Sirius Black would never do in a million years unless he was in actual physical pain and even then he was as likely to crack jokes just so he could claim them as tears of laughter.
"Pads?"
"Forget it, Moony," Sirius sighed.
"I think I'm the one who's missed something now."
His friend just shook his head and tore the list in half again.
This was bad. The possibility that Sirius was crying was weird enough, but destroying Operation Not-Prongs? Sirius never gave up on one of his operations, especially not after putting so much time into it. He might put it away until he had more clues, but he never just quit. Something had happened while he was down in the common room snogging Hermione. Clearly, it wasn't the boy's earlier misconception that Harry and Hermione were somehow a romantic item since Remus had disproven that nonsense theory. It had to be something else.
He had seen Harry running from the dorms, red-faced and cursing.
"He turned you down?" Remus speculated, watching as Sirius sunk further into his pillow and his complexion turned an off shade.
"Just forget it," Sirius said, sounding even worse than he looked. He scrunched the bits of parchment into a tight ball and threw them into the dustbin beside his bed.
After seeing so many impossible things in the last few minutes, Remus just had to know what all this was about. Rejection seemed the most obvious reason for Sirius's misery, but his reaction was all wrong if that were true. When rejected—a rare and unusual response from any boy or girl—Sirius's eyes would sparkle and he would grin like a madman as he plotted a new approach. Defeat was not Sirius' style. 'Defeat' wasn't even in his vocabulary except where it was applied to other people.
No, he was probably still too much of a coward to admit his feelings, which left only one other explanation: Operation Not-Prongs had been a success. Sirius knew the truth and it had been so disappointing he wanted to forget that it ever existed.
Remus could not let that happen, not before he, too, knew the truth. Admittedly, he had been rather distracted since winning Hermione's affection, but he still had a lot invested in that parchment. He, like Sirius, had put too much time and energy into the mystery that was the Grangers to abort the mission without a damn good reason, not even if the truth was as unsatisfactory as Sirius made it seem. He, too, would know what their secret was.
"Whatever you say, Pads," he assured his friend, though he had absolutely no intention of honouring his implied promise.
oOo
Harry ran. He knew there was no dire panic, but he still ran. He ran from the Headmaster's Office down the corridor and across the castle to the library where he hoped Hermione would be. So much had happened in the last sixty minutes, he was not certain even that reliable constant of Hermione in the library would hold true anymore. So much had changed. He was not sure if they had changed for the better or not. Maybe Hermione would know.
Ignoring the hateful glare of the librarian, he ran through the stacks to the caged Restricted Section and started calling for his fake sister. "Hermione! Hermione!"
"Why are you shouting?" she asked testily as she emerged from behind a teetering pile of books.
"What do you know about Split-Apart?" the boy questioned, barely able to speak from his race across the castle.
Surprisingly the girl scoffed. "Romantic nonsense."
His jaw dropped. "Didn't sound particularly romantic to me, being torn apart."
She just snorted again.
"But you have heard of it," he insisted. "Dumbledore and Morven think it might have been what brought us here."
"I don't see how." She shook her head, but stopped as Harry looked worriedly at her again. "Oh not again," she sighed. "Harry, tell me exactly what you think a Split-Apart is."
"A curse," he said. "A nasty, horrible curse that tears someone limb from limb."
Her reaction was more appropriate this time; her eyes widened and cheeks paled. "That's not the Split-Apart I've heard of. Dumbledore thinks that's the curse Malfoy threw?"
Harry nodded. "He said it was too weak, though, but I know that's what it was. We've got to find out more. I thought for sure you would have heard of it."
"No," she said sadly. "I'm not even sure where to start research on something so horrid."
"Ask a Slytherin."
Her brow folded in on itself as she considered it. "Maybe not."
"Huh?" he asked, a little stupidly.
"Harry, you're in The Slug Club. Think about how many great minds have come from it. It's the ultimate Brain Trust in the wizarding world," she said. "There has to be some expert on Defence that owes Slughorn a favour."
That was true. Slughorn did have a nose for sniffing out talent and collecting it for his own prestige and gain. As the months had passed and he attended his fair share of Slug Club dinners and parties, Harry had seen more and more famous faces, and more than a few infamous ones. He had counted at least five Death Eaters, though it seemed to him that they had not yet turned their admiring eye from Slughorn to Voldemort; two of them actually seemed like decent people, hard as it was to admit.
"I can ask," Harry said slowly as he considered how to broach the subject.
"You'll find a way to approach him," she said, sounding confident. It was a feeling he did not share and he could only nod his reply.
"How did it go with Sirius?" she questioned.
"Ah… about that…"
"You told him?" she guessed, her voice an octave too high.
He flinched, unsure if it had been the pain to his ears or the fear of a hex that made him do it. "Not exactly. He just sort of put all the pieces together; I might have helped him along a bit."
The girl did not groan or shout, much to his surprise. Instead she took a step back as if to look at the whole of him, examining him as she would a flobberworm in Potions to gauge its quality. "What did he say?"
"Nothing," Harry replied, thinking back over the incident and considering his young Godfather's reaction. "He didn't say anything. Just sort of sat there and looked ill."
Hermione made a noncommittal noise, which did nothing to encourage him.
"Is that bad?" he wondered aloud.
Again the girl only replied with a 'hm'.
"Will you stop making that noise!" he growled, annoyed that she was not being more useful and opinionated. He was in a bloody awful mess and she was meant to be helping him, spouting some text or other on how to fix such convoluted relationships.
"Well, what do you want me to say?" she demanded with a huff.
"Something helpful."
"Dumbledore will take care of it when we leave," she said with an odd smile.
"What?"
"That was what you told me when I was worried about the consequences of dating Remus," she reminded him, her odd smile turning decidedly smug. "You told me that he wouldn't risk them knowing about all this after we had gone, that he would take care of it when we went home. You said, and I quote, 'It's not normal, but if you like him…'. So, do you like him?"
Harry blinked back his confusion. "Of course I like him, he's my friend."
"That's not what I meant and you know it," she said, her words clipped with her annoyance. "Do. You. Fancy. Sirius?"
"I don't know."
She groaned. "You are as stubborn as Lily, you know that? Just admit it already!"
"But I don't know!" he said, as irritated as his fake sister. He really didn't. He had only ever fancied girls. Well, one girl. And that hadn't actually turned out all that well. But just because his one and only date and crush had crashed and burned did not mean he suddenly fancied other blokes. Not that there was anything wrong with blokes liking other blokes, he added hastily in his thoughts. He had just never been one of them.
"Harry, you risked arrest and death to save him. Twice. You love him."
"Of course I love him, he's family," he insisted.
"You love him as family," she sighed. "You like him as a friend. Why is it so hard to admit you fancy him, too?"
He glared at her, refusing to answer.
"Stubborn."
He glowered down at the polished floor. It had been covered in a thick layer of dust when they first started visiting the Restricted Section in September, looking like a dim grey carpet. They had worn it away, leaving the true colour of the ancient stones visible. Just what Hermione was trying to do now with her logic, wear away the blurry line separating friend from boyfriend.
"What did you think a Split-Apart was?" he asked, keen to move the conversation away from the topic of Sirius.
She let loose a quiet laugh. "A soul mate."
Harry took on the appearance of a boy who swallowed a lemon, but that did not keep her from talking.
"Plato wrote that humans had once been bound together, two bodies as one, until the Gods split them apart, tearing the human soul in half. Ever since, each human has walked the earth in search of their other half."
"Romantic nonsense," Harry grumbled.
That oddly smug smile took over her face again. "Funny thing, that hex having the same name as such an ancient idea. Plato lived and wrote in the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ; I doubt if the Split-Apart curse existed then. Maybe there's more to it than we think… Maybe if it's cast on someone with a portkey it will take them to their soul mate."
"Will you shut up?"
"I will when you finally admit that you fancy Sirius."
"Shut up," he muttered.
"Stubborn git."