Chapter 61: Second Thoughts
A person could only take so much disappointment.
Harry Potter could take more than most. His lacklustre childhood running from his cousin's gang, living in baggy hand-me-downs and sleeping in a cupboard had both lowered his expectations of life and raised his threshold for accepting horrible situations. Or so he had thought.
As he stared down at his uneaten roast and jacket potatoes, Harry realised that his threshold for misery had finally been crossed. He was absolutely, bitterly disappointed. Not in life or himself. He was disappointed in Sirius.
After all he had seen and been told about the boy, he had expected more from him. He had expected unparalleled bravado and a pig-headed determination to do, if not what was right, at least what he thought best. But the boy had left him. Twice. One time he could accept given the blow the boy had just been dealt by his cousin, but to do it two times showed a cowardice Harry had never thought Sirius capable of possessing. He was allowing his family to make his decisions for him. He had walked away with some vague and, frankly, weak excuse about some class assignment or something, and now he wasn't even at dinner.
His gut twisted as he looked to the empty space where Sirius ought to be sitting.
"He'll come 'round," Peter promised.
"You know that for fact?"
"Sirius always does the right thing by his friends," the boy insisted. "Especially if it means a pair of forked fingers at that family of his."
Harry looked across the table at the cherubic face smiling encouragingly, if a little too sympathetically, at him. He wasn't sure when it happened but somewhere along the way he had started to kind of like Peter. He still hated him for what he would do and for landing him in detention for the Red Handed Harry prank, but he could be genuinely kind when he wanted to be. Somehow, having Peter be so much more than he had anticipated made Sirius's behaviour seem all the worse.
"Shouldn't you be discouraging me from starting a relationship two days before I leave for another country?" he questioned.
Peter snorted. "You two have been a couple for months, Granger. It's just you that's been too stupid to see it."
"And now that I do, Sirius is running away from me every chance he gets," he replied darkly.
"Sirius doesn't run from anything. Certainly not you."
Harry couldn't keep the smile from his face. "What? And here I thought I was perfectly terrifying in every way."
"Quit your moping," James said as he threw a roll at him. "And quit trying to get into Padfoot's trousers. I'm placing all the blame for his rubbish performance on you."
"How could that possibly be my fault? He's not even talking to me."
"Precisely," he said, easily dodging the roll Harry had sent flying at his head. "He's too busy 'thinking' and all that rot to focus on what really matters. Five years we've been on the team, Harry – four of which Sirius has spent snogging his way through this school – and in all that time he has never been as crap as he has been this week. As far as I'm concerned, this is all your doing."
"It's not my fault if he's being a coward."
"I think Pads is fully justified after you spring all this Johannesburg stuff on him. It's not as if the poor sod had insight into such things, now is it?" Beneath the smug smile, there was a sharp barb of anger, which James had every right to direct it at him. Harry really had known better the entire time he had flirted with Sirius. Knowing what he did, he should not have let anything come of it.
"Little late now," he muttered and pushed himself up off the bench.
"Not too late to fix it. I will not have you running off to Johannesburg and leaving me with a broken-hearted beater too busy crying to do his job properly."
Harry wasn't sure if he ought to laugh or frown as he imagined Sirius as one of the women from Aunt Petunia's telly dramas, sobbing into a bowl of ice cream and laying about the house in fuzzy slippers. It was wholly unrealistic. "In case you didn't notice, Sirius has left me. Not the other way round."
"Because you've never walked away from something you want," James commented, hazel eyes boring into him over the tops of his glasses.
Harry could not tamp down the knowledge that he was being scolded by his father. The conditions were convoluted, but he knew the tone and look being thrown at him were those of a disappointed parent and not those of a friend. He shifted uncomfortably on the bench. "I have detention."
"And I couldn't be prouder," James said. Harry couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic.
The boy's words haunted him all the way to Filch's office. For as long as he had known the truth about the Potters, Harry had wanted to make his parents proud, to show them how good he was at being a Wizard. He might have done as much, but he felt as if he were proving nothing but a disappointment as a human being.
"Hurry it up," Filch called.
The man was actually smiling when Harry met him outside his door.
"Dungeons" was all the man said as he handed over a pail. Apparently, he quite enjoyed seeing him coated head to toe in green muck, for he hadn't bothered inventing any new or more disgusting punishments for the final week of detentions. It was just as well. The task was harmless and mindless enough to allow him to think on all the things that needed thinking on. Namely how to fix the mess he had made with Sirius.
"You'll have company tonight," the caretaker informed him, his gravelly voice positively gleeful.
"Joy," he said as he started down the stairs to the dungeons. Counter intuitively, the sconces were spread farther apart the lower he travelled, making visibility something of an issue. Whoever was down here with him probably wouldn't even know he was there, which suited him just fine. He wasn't in the mood to listen to someone whinge about how unfair the punishment was.
"Harry? Is that you?" a voice called from the darkness.
He knew that voice. It had filled his dreams for months, whispered in his ear and hummed against his skin. "Sirius? What the hell are you doing here?"
"Got detention, didn't I?" he replied as he found his way into the light of a torch, displaying his own pail and a brush green with algae. His shirt showed that he had been at the task for some time.
"I thought you had an assignment to work on. That's the excuse you gave when you left me. Again," Harry replied. "Got caught reading a book, did you?" He sounded petulant, and he knew it. He also knew that he didn't care.
Sirius, to his credit, looked suitably chastised. "Actually, that was my excuse for leaving you at the lake. Last time it was that I had something to do. I wasn't paying attention, didn't see that bloody cat. James is going to kill me for losing the map to Filch."
"He'll kill you worse if you lose the match," Harry informed him flatly. "So what were you doing that had you so distracted?"
The boy hesitated. "Things," he finally said. "Important things. I wouldn't have been so distracted, but I didn't have a lot of time to think about it, now did it? You only just found the spell that brought you here a fortnight ago. Next thing I know you're leaving on Saturday!"
"We got the letter a week ago, Sirius. You probably didn't know about it because you were off having a strop."
"It wasn't a strop. I was off thinking about important things. For you." He was across the corridor in an instant, towering over Harry as if he might bully him into accepting his explanations.
Harry had faced far more intimidating opponents than him. He gave the boy a hard shove, sending him stumbling back a pace. "You want to do something for me? Try being with me. I'm leaving in two days, going away to a place I'll never see you again, and instead of spending the rest of my time with you, I'm trying to sort out what the hell game you're playing!"
"Harry, I—"
All the hours of frustration and worry found an outlet as Harry balled up a fist and swung hard at the boy's face, connected with painful accuracy. "No! I don't care about your bollocks excuses. I am tired of everyone abandoning me. If you had planned on leaving me from the beginning, you should have just left me alone. I warned you not to make promises you couldn't keep."
"I want to keep this one," Sirius said, catching his hands before he could strike again. "I want to."
"Then why haven't you?"
Even in the dim light, Harry could see his grey eyes look away evasively. "There… There were things—"
"Important things you had to think about. Heard it before," Harry scoffed. "Let me go."
"Why? So you can hit me again?"
"So I can be the one to walk away for a change," he spat, jerking his hands free as Sirius went limp in shock. "I'm doing what I should have done months ago, Sirius. I'm not playing your game."
"It's not a game."
"Like it wasn't a game with that Ravenclaw second year? You treat people like it's a prank. It's all just fun and fucking with people."
"It's not a game or a prank. I love you."
"No, you don't. You just want what you can't have." Harry took up his pail and stalked into the darkness, too angry to care which way he was going so long as it was far from Sirius. He had spent too much time trying to figure out a mystery that did not need solving. He was returning to a world without Sirius Black. All this fussing and fighting was pointless, a melodrama long since over in twenty years.
Still, his chest was on fire as the echo of those three short words rang in his ears.
Yes, he loved Sirius. His Sirius, the one dead and gone in another time. And , yes, his Sirius had loved him. He had loved him as a friend, maybe even as a son, before his stupidity got the man killed. That's all this was, he insisted, guilt making him too attached to a boy that was not the man he knew. He wasn't even supposed to know this boy. It was a mistake. Just a mistake. He repeated it over and over as he scrubbed at the walls.
"Just a mistake," he said dully. "That's all it was. A mistake."
"You're wrong," Sirius told him, his voice quiet but certain.
When he did not reply, Sirius commented, "You've not exactly been innocent in all this. You flirted with me as much as I did you. You didn't tell me to piss off when I came to your bed that night. You want me. You love me."
Harry had not bothered to turn as the boy spoke. They were in darkness and wouldn't have been able to see each other even if he had, but to turn would have meant he was accepting in some way, that he wanted what the boy had to offer; he couldn't let Sirius think that. He leaned his forehead against the stones, feeling the slick algae against his hot skin. Beneath that clinging slime, the wall was cold and hard and everything he needed Sirius to hear in his voice. He forced himself to sound detached as he replied.
"That was a mistake. You were a mistake. I'm only staying for James, then we're going home."