章 2253: 10
Sirius did not feel good about what he was doing. An uneasy churning in his gut accompanied him in his late-night preparations, unsettled him while he made the tea, and persisted as he added a few drops of a powerful, odorless sleeping potion to the mix for one of the two cups.
Part of his unease was related to wondering whether he could pull it off at all. Taylor might have doubts about her adequacy as a self-taught witch, but that was purely internal, in his opinion. Her bug trick alone made her formidable, to say nothing of the superior animagus substitute he had helped her develop to work with her peculiar magic. Her cleverness with basic spells was outright terrifying when combined with those capabilities.
But for all her competence, she wasn't expecting to be stabbed in the back. Not by him. She fell asleep too quickly to really understand what he had done, and the vermin-clearing spells he had learned in preparation served him well as he cleared out Grimmauld Place as best he could. He didn't even have to fight off a wave of murderous spiders and hornets, as he had suspected he might. The bugs were stuck in a holding pattern, barely moving as he struck them down by the hundreds. Many stared up at him as he worked, eerily focused but not attacking or fleeing.
Truth be told, success made him feel even more like a complete tosser. Here he was, drugging the woman who had saved his arse compensating for his deficiencies in going after Pettigrew, the woman who helped him get his life back on track, Harry's mum. All on Dumbledore's word, the same man who had admitted to trying to drive her out of Harry's life based on nothing more than a feeling he got when illegally rummaging through her mind. The horror of Summoning added weight to Dumbledore's claims, weight that had to be taken seriously, but regardless… That didn't make this okay. Not when it could all just be another lie stacked on top of the rest.
That said, he wasn't turning her over to Dumbledore, or Remus, or anyone else. He knew Taylor. Or he thought he did. If anyone was going to confirm or deny the things Dumbledore suspected, it would be him. Then, and only then, would he decide what else to do. If Dumbledore was wrong, then he would never know Sirius knew Taylor, let alone that the events of tonight had occurred. If he was right, he might still never know, depending on exactly what Sirius found out. 'Put her down,' indeed. Not happening on Sirius' watch.
Taylor was surprisingly light when he lifted her out of her chair. She didn't wear her Muggle false arm when it was just him around, and there wasn't an ounce of excess fat on her body. Her head lolled against his shoulder, and he had to gather her hair out of the way after he set her down in the attic. Stealing her Visio charm and waiting out the blinding majority of the charm's duration, he confirmed that she didn't have any backup magic on her, like Moody had.
That was no surprise. She was open with him. He knew that she had given Moody's little potion vials back, and she didn't know how to make or get portkeys as of yet. Her backup wand was just another wand, not special like her main wand, and he took it away from her anyway, depriving her of her only holdout defense.
He felt like shit for what he was going to do, even if it proved Dumbledore right, so he wasn't going to do it in the cells down in Grimmauld's basement. That was a place for proven enemies, prisoners. The attic was just as warded, having once served as a ritual conduction site back when the occasional Muggleborn witch might 'disappear' just before full moons and nobody cared. It was undoubtedly the site of a hundred horrors, but it didn't have bars, it didn't have bare stone walls, and it didn't make him feel quite as much like he was following in his family's footsteps. He wasn't here to conduct a ritual, and the attic was just an unused extra room nowadays. One with good security.
He reluctantly tied her to a wrought iron chair brought up from storage, securing all of her limbs, her torso, and even her hair back to the chair itself. Then he cast a dozen different restraint charms on her still unconscious form, including an overpowered human transfiguration variant that would resist any new application of human transfiguration. It wouldn't hold an animagus, that was internal magic, but it might just stop however she applied external magic to herself to shift forms.
If it didn't, well, that was why he was in the attic and not somewhere more comfortable. A snake or moose or any other animal would be unable to escape, even if they could do magic. The necessary power or finesse to take down the wards from inside was beyond Taylor. Hell, it was beyond him, and he had grown up around this kind of magic.
He went back down to the kitchen, retrieved the potion that had cost him a substantial amount in Knockturn Alley, as well as the antidote to the sleeping potion, and returned to the attic.
"No going back now," he whispered. It was late, but he wasn't tired at all, and his conscience dictated he get this done without any delay. He had already broken Taylor's trust, and whether or not it was for a good reason remained to be seen. He wouldn't keep her drugged overnight just so he could feel a little more rested before owning up.
He jabbed his wand at the trapdoor and intoned a single word, a carefully-enunciated 'seal.' The attic's security measures activated, and the trapdoor's metal hinges shifted to solid blocks of iron. The smell of the air itself changed, refreshed instead of musty and stale, as the other sealing systems kicked into effect.
Nothing was getting out. Nothing was getting in. He had blanketed the entire attic in vermin-killing charms beforehand, and the defenses included the walls themselves, so nothing could burrow through. Not sound, not light, not most forms of magic. The only feasible way out without tearing the magic itself from the building was for him to lift the security.
The Blacks as a family might be stark raving mad, but their security for their heinous deeds was second to none. A thousand innocents could have died in this room and nobody would ever have known. If there really was something lurking in Taylor, watching and waiting for the right time to strike, it shouldn't be able to leave now.
If there wasn't, then he had destroyed the trust between them for nothing but an old man's delusions. It was only because the old man was Dumbledore, with a very convincing and reasonable story backing him, that Sirius was even considering he might be telling the truth. He didn't blindly trust Dumbledore, not since getting out of Azkaban, but the man had the reputation he did for very good reasons. The dual factors of Dumbledore and Summoning demanded he at least check before calling the man a liar. What kind of fool would completely ignore such a direct, dire warning?
Probably Minister Fudge. That man could win awards for burying his head in the sand.
Sirius went to Taylor, still bound and slumbering, and tilted her head back. From one of the two potions he had brought in he measured out six drops, twice the usual amount. Three drops of veritaserum magically forced the truth from even the strongest-willed. Six put them in such a stupor they could barely think beyond what the questions required them to think about. Another line of defense, as was administering the veritaserum before giving her the antidote to the sleeping potion and waking her up.
Having veritaserum at all was a defense. He had postponed his plans a full week waiting to acquire some, and would have held them back as long as necessary. He didn't trust anything less to work. If nothing else, he would have the truth as she understood it.
Her main wand, he had left in the kitchen, charmed to stick to the table for good measure. Her remaining insects, the ones he couldn't find in his extermination efforts, were all outside too. She had no backup magic on her person. Her remaining limbs were tied down, the chair was magically secured to the floor, there were no sharp edges to cut things with and he had charmed the physical – so they could not be dispelled – ropes imperturbable. He had double-dosed her and locked the attic down, and he knew exactly what he needed to do and ask. If the veritaserum failed, he had four different backup plans to evaluate the situation, albeit that they were all risky and less likely to work.
If he was going to violate her trust on the off chance that there really was some otherworldly thing possessing her, he wasn't going to half-ass it.
Not if. When. Because he had begun and there was no point in turning back now.
He slipped the antidote to the sleeping potion into her mouth, a few more potent drops on her tongue, and waited, his wand trained on her. She woke quickly, but the only sign he had that she was awake at all was her eyes sliding open to reveal a dull, unseeing gaze.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Taylor Anne Hebert," she answered, her voice downright lifeless.
The veritaserum seemed to be working, but he couldn't trust the tone of her voice alone. "What do you think is going on?"
"I am answering questions." Nothing more, just as he would expect from a double-dose of Veritaserum. Most interrogations used a single dose because a double dose sorely limited how much information the speaker could provide. Taylor was barely conscious, and she could only really think about things in direct response to what he asked.
She would hate him for this. She hated being obliviated, and this was another way of taking her agency from her, if only temporarily.
"Do you have any secrets you would not want me to know?" he asked, his mouth dry. He had to prove that she was incapable of holding back first, no matter how much he wanted to just jump to the big question.
"Yes," she said.
"What is the most minor secret you are keeping from me?" he asked.
It took her a few seconds to come up with an answer, which he attributed to the mind-fogging influence of the veritaserum, not any sign of resistance. She couldn't resist. Not without it being obvious. "I think your trouser snake joke is funny. I like your sense of humor."
"That just makes me feel worse about this, you know," he sighed. Why couldn't she have been a cold, calculating bitch like his cousins? Then he could be interrogating her with glee, not feeling like the worst guy in the world. "To your knowledge, are you being controlled by any outside source, or have you been since we first met?"
Taylor's blank eyes stared at the empty air in front of her. "No."
Worst-case scenario averted. No Taylor meat puppet with a thing on the other end, stringing him along for months on end. Or if there was, she was completely unaware of it, which made it slightly less horrific. On to the next worst thing. "Could you be controlled by an outside source?"
"Yes," she answered.
"How?" he asked, trying not to leap to conclusions.
"Imperio. Mind magic. Effective blackmail or coercion. Selective obliviation and confundus. Possibly if I am transfigured into any form of insect. Biotinkering. Nerve hijacking. Physical force. Mental manipulation. Social manipulation. Thinker manipulation. Master manipulation. Possibly mundane hypnosis. Conditioning. Other unknown effects."
It took him a few moments to wrap his mind around that wordy answer. It was his fault, he had asked too broad a question, but… He didn't even know what some of those things were. Muggle stuff, maybe?
"Is there someone or something else in your head with you?" he tried. "Right now?" Maybe if he asked after the effects, not whether the end result could be achieved-
"Yes."
His heart leaped into his throat. "Who is it?" What is it?
"I don't know if it has a true name. I call it my power, my passenger. Someone who knows more named it Queen Administrator, but that was an alias."
"Fuck." That was fucking ominous. "Is it human? Was it ever human?" It looked like he would be delving into his patchwork knowledge of Summoning after all. Damn it all, Dumbledore wasn't wrong.
"No," she said, quashing his last hope for less eldritch answers.
"Do you know what it is?" he pressed.
"Yes," she said simply.
"Okay, what?" he asked. "What is the thing in your head that we are speaking about?" Best he be as precise as possible; bad wording might get him dud answers.
"A piece of a larger whole," Taylor said. "Multidimensional hive mind aliens that travel from star to star seeking innovation. It is a physically massive being that exists in a cordoned-off alternate dimension. The larger entity is dead, so it is… A lingering shard." She seemed to be confused, even under the influence of veritaserum. "A… Lonely knowledge seeker. With no purpose. Broken from the cycle. Attached to a brave host. Working for her, lacking any larger purpose. Learning. Improving. Helping Taylor."
Invisible fingers of terror crept down Sirius' spine as she switched to speaking in third person, and he kept his wand pointed firmly at the head of the woman he was no longer sure was speaking for herself. "Am I talking to Taylor, or to the shard?"
"Taylor… But the shard wishes to help. The shard is using magic to… give information to Taylor. Right now. The magic forcing her to speak is widening the connection. Forcing the shard to speak through her. Magic works on the source of magic, not just the body."
Sirius was in so far over his head he didn't know which way was up. "How do I fix that?" he asked desperately. What good was learning the truth if in doing so he broke the Summoned thing out and gave it Taylor's body altogether?
"It will recede when the effect wears off," the thing speaking through Taylor, or perhaps Taylor herself this time, assured him. "The shard will fix the connection. Narrow it. The shard does not… want… to be in control. Taylor is essential. The shard helps her. That is all that is left."
"But you… the shard could take control?" Sirius asked, only mildly reassured. If he trusted the veritaserum to force even the thing on the other side to speak the truth, then, well… He didn't know. This was why that unnamed wizard had broken Summoning all those years ago! Shit like this!
"Yes." She tilted her head, though she shouldn't have had the will to move at all. Her unfocused eyes continued to stare at nothing, but they were staring a little more in his direction than before. "But it would kill Taylor. The shard does not… want… to kill Taylor."
"How… what does the shard want?" he asked, though he was sure he was going to regret it. World destruction, the souls of the innocent, sacrifices, those were the things the Summons of old traded in. Power and suffering and deals that no sane wizard would ever take.
Still, he had to know.
"To help Taylor," it listed in monotone. "To learn. To see what Taylor does with power. To serve a purpose. To watch. To listen. To understand. To exist forever."
It was too good to be true. "What would the shard do once it knew everything magic had to offer?" he pressed.
"Watch Taylor. See what Taylor does with all magic. Help Taylor. Learn from Taylor."
"Okay… and when Taylor dies?" he asked.
"Taylor will not die. Magic is capable of sustaining humans until heat death. Not the answer, but humans do not need the answer to live until others find the answer."
Sirius knew a lot of that had flown right over his head, but he thought he had the jist of it now… The Summoned monster from another dimension was a Ravenclaw that wanted its favorite human to be immortal so they could do research together forever.
Was it insanity if that didn't actually sound so bad to him?
"Maybe I'm going crazy," Sirius said to himself. "About time, I suppose. What if Taylor did die anyway?" he asked. "What would the shard want then?"
"To resurrect Taylor to full capacity. If impossible, to reform Taylor from collected data. If impossible, to simulate Taylor using magic or data. If impossible, to connect to Taylor's progeny. If impossible, to connect to another human."
He might be mad, but he was pretty sure now that Taylor's summoned mind-monster was as benign as it was possible to be while still being a monster from another dimension. "Do you plan to do horrible things to any other humans?" he asked, thinking about what Dumbledore had told him.
"This shard plans to assist Taylor in whatever she chooses to do." Taylor's voice was growing hoarse.
"Does the shard ever act on its own with or without Taylor's knowledge?" he asked.
"The shard directs her subjects while she is unconscious," was the answer. "Beyond that, no. The shard could, magic is from it, not her, but it does not. That is not the point. Taylor is the point. Her decisions. Her ideas."
"So why is Dumbledore freaking out about horrible things he saw whenever he looked in her mind?" Sirius asked, finally getting around to the root cause of this terrifying mess. If this Summon was so altruistic and helpful, why was Dumbledore getting the willies from it hard enough to obliviate somebody and steal their child? Surely Taylor couldn't have done things so horrible they would prompt that reaction.
"Taylor… I…" she blinked, but her eyes were no more focused than before. "Memories. If he saw memories, he saw my past. Bad memories. Fractured memories. Thousands of perspectives, from every bug. Or the shard's memories. Even worse."
"Of what?" He had looked up the incantation to legilimency in preparation for the veritaserum not being enough, but there was no way in hell he was going to jump into that rabbit hole now.
"Hell," Taylor said. "Death. Monsters. Monstrous acts. The Simurgh. Scion. The entities… experimenting. Learning. Before I killed it. Fighting it."
So Dumbledore had accidentally brushed the memories of Taylor… fighting… an eldritch being, or maybe the eldritch being's personal memories, and was understandably concerned, even if this one piece here was benign. It was no more unbelievable than anything else he had heard tonight, though he had no idea when Taylor could have done any of this, or where. Possibly not in this world, and wasn't that an uncomfortable thought? "You killed the… mind? The leader?"
"The guiding intelligence died because of my plan, my coordination," Taylor confirmed. "It was destroying… everything. I killed it. Now the… shards have no purpose."
"Shards. Plural. What about the others?" Were there other people walking around with less benign multidimensional Ravenclaws in their heads?
"I think it's only me on this world," she said, confirming what he had suspected. "The shield against Summoning… must have worked. Mostly. I was brought here, nobody else was that I know of. The rest are attached to people in unguarded worlds. I have seen no signs of it spreading here."
The veritaserum was beginning to wear off, as indicated by Taylor sounding a little less lifeless. Sirius, by contrast, was only just starting to come off the adrenaline high of conversing with a multidimensional, maybe not technically Summoned but close enough, thing, and not losing his soul, sanity, life, or anything else. He was pretty sure he didn't have much more left in him. Sometime soon, he was going to collapse into a quivering puddle of nerves. Thankfully not literally.
"To be clear," he said, "are you a threat to Harry?"
"I love Harry and I would never hurt him unless he forced me to," Taylor said. "My shard wants him alive in case something happens to me… now that you mentioned it. It didn't think of him before that. I think."
Yes, it was definitely wearing off. "How about Dumbledore?"
"I want to strangle him with his beard," Taylor asserted. "For what he has done. Not because of the shard."
"Anyone else?"
"I want to live my life, with my son, without being in danger. Without being oppressed. Without watching others in danger or oppressed. I am only a threat to the people stopping me from having that."
"What about me?" Sirius asked.
"I don't know. I wasn't before."
That was probably the best he could hope for.
Dots and worms and clear shapes were swimming in her eyes.
What were they called? Those little translucent blips and ropes and webs? She had looked it up, back when she first started to persistently see them a few years ago. They weren't magical. Most people saw them. Things floating inside the eyes. Globs of coagulated stuff. Blood, sometimes. Eye fluid.
Floaters.
That was it. She was seeing floaters.
Floaters swam in her vision, most in her right eye. Behind their translucent forms she saw a dusty attic. A tired Sirius.
Her head pounded fiercely. She tried to lift her hand to cover her eyes, to make the headache go away.
What had she been doing? She remembered… talking. To Sirius. He asked questions. She answered them. Sometimes she said things because they came out of her mouth, not because she thought them.
Her hand wouldn't move. Something tugged at her hair, holding her head back. Her legs were tied down, too.
"Wha… What the hell, Sirius?" she asked, her own voice sending jolts of pain through her forehead.
He tied her up. He drugged her, tied her up, and made her answer questions. Made… her shard answer questions?
Amidst all the pain, she could feel a brief burst of distracted confirmation. It was clearer than usual, more nuanced, but that was fading away even as her headache worsened.
Her shard… said… though her… that it was going to fix the connection.
The one Sirius broke. With veritaserum. As if that made any sense. Magic. Still utterly unpredictable.
"That you in there?" Sirius asked.
"Yes… No thanks to you." She knew what had happened. What he had done. Some of why he did it. Dumbledore. Had to be. He'd come back from a meeting with the man a few weeks ago. Lied about it. Because of course he had.
It was always fucking Dumbledore.
Sirius started dispelling the many, many charms and other things holding her down, but she made no move to rise, not even when he started asking her if he was okay.
She wasn't okay. Not hurt, not permanently… But she wasn't okay.
Sirius cut the last of the ropes tying her to the chair, and she knew she could move. He was right behind her.
The floaters in her vision weren't going away. They were distracting.
They were the least of her problems.
He said something else. Something about having ended the lockdown. The trapdoor in the floor swung open of its own accord. He kept talking.
She wasn't listening.
His face hovered in her line of sight; he had come around, leaning in to look at her. She sat limply.
Limply, until she jabbed a fist into his gut. He wheezed in her face, doubling over, and she drew her arm back to twist and drive her elbow into his ear, knocking him over with a vicious blow. Then she stood, as he toppled to the floor.
She kicked him in the ribs, hard. Only once, but hard enough to break bones.
The floaters were still there, in her right eye in particular, and they weren't going away. Wouldn't go away; floaters were permanent. Seeing a lot of new ones at once was a warning sign that she might be in danger of going blind in that eye. She knew, because she had looked it up.
She was angry. So, so angry with him. For making her feel helpless, for surprising her when she had her guard down, for drugging her and violating her trust… For doing it on Dumbledore's behalf.
Her insects came boiling up the trapdoor, pouring into the room like a tidal wave. Every single bug she had established in Grimmauld Place, diminished – Sirius would have killed the ones he could find – but a formidable force nonetheless. More than enough to strip the flesh from his bones. They were waiting, grouped up under the trapdoor. Probably brought there for her by her power, while she was barely conscious.
She could kill him. She had that option.
But she was better than that.
She stalked away, into the mob of insects and down the trapdoor. Her bugs followed, abandoning Sirius to lie on the floor of the attic and wheeze.
Her bugs pulled her things to her as she walked. The coat she had left on the coatrack, her glasses and wand from the kitchen table and her notes from the library.
Maybe she would come back. Maybe she wouldn't. But right now, she was removing herself from the situation and from his presence before she did something she couldn't take back.
She was better, these days. She had to be better. Harry didn't need Skitter. Probably wouldn't want her. Taylor didn't want to be that, either. Even if it was tempting.
Lucky for Sirius. Because the way she felt right now, rational or not, warranted or not, Skitter would have torn him apart.
Harry was worried about his mum.
She had come into the castle on a weekday, which was already unusual. She came as Hissy, of course, but she came dragging a big parchment of handwritten notes on spells, along with a few other things he had to go get for her from the secret passage so they wouldn't get damp.
She also wasn't saying much. Just that she was physically fine, and that she didn't want to be alone.
He had only seen his mum this… vulnerable… a few times before. He took her things, hid them under his bed, and let her coil around his shoulders to accompany him to Runes class without any further questions. They got a lot of funny looks from the students who didn't know about his familiar, and he used the excuse that she wasn't feeling well – which was true – when they asked.
That was what he told his friends, too. He didn't know anything more. She wasn't injured, she had told him that, but something had hurt her, or scared her, or just upset her to the point that she would rather curl up on his bed than talk or fight back.
He studied in his room that night, sitting on his bed next to her. His roommates were out, working on some strategies for Cedric to use if the third task involved spellcrafting puzzles. Most of his friends would be out there, working to help Cedric. They could cope without him. These runes weren't going to memorize themselves.
His mum wasn't going to open up to herself. She didn't need him very often – love him, yes, always, but not need him – and he wasn't going to let her down now that she did.
He studied well into the night. His roommates came in and went to bed, drawing their curtains so that the lights wouldn't keep them up. He cast a larger version of the desk silencing ward around himself and his bed and kept working.
"You won't sleep until I talk, is that it?" his mum finally hissed.
"Yes." He wasn't guilting her, but if this was a battle of wills he would go down to the school nurse and ask for a Pepper-Up potion before he gave in. He would get Hermione to brew him one, if necessary. She had to know that.
Besides, she wanted to talk. She would have said if she didn't. That was how she worked.
"I shouldn't be dumping my troubles on my own child," his mum hissed regretfully. "But who else could I turn to? I don't trust anyone like I do you."
"Not Sirius?" He had thought she was getting along with Sirius. As well as she got along with anyone, that was. Better than most.
"Sirius is the problem," his mum hissed. She partially uncoiled herself, rising up over his piled-up blankets to sway back and forth as she looked at him. "Him and Dumbledore. He spoke to Dumbledore. Dumbledore told him just enough to get him to betray me."
Harry startled; he hadn't expected it to be something that important! "Are you in danger? Is Sirius working with Dumbledore? Are they looking for you to do… something?" If they were, he would have to hide her a lot better than this! Sirius knew she was Hissy, Dumbledore knew where he slept, they could come in any moment–
"No, Dumbledore is clueless for now," his mum assured him, her sibilant voice bitter. "He told Sirius… something. Something that convinced Sirius that it was a good idea to drug me, tie me up, and force veritaserum into me until I couldn't even think straight. The only saving grace was he did it all on his own, and I don't think he told anyone."
"He didn't!" Harry exclaimed.
"He did," his mum retorted. "He dragged things out of me, digging for proof of what Dumbledore told him. Things I have not told anyone, things I never meant to tell anyone except you when you were older, things that I did not – do not – trust him to know!"
"Now he does." Harry thought about that. "Do you need help hunting him down and having him obliviated?" He was sure Hermione could learn the spell, and if she couldn't Ginny might already know it thanks to Tom.
"I'll think about it," his mum hissed. She let her lengthy body fall limp across the pile of blankets. "I am not worried about silencing him. One way or another, that will be easy. I do not think he found what Dumbledore told him to look for. He would not have let me go if he did."
"But it must really hurt to not be able to trust him anymore," Harry said. He hoped none of his friends ever betrayed him like that.
"It hurts more to wonder whether I still can," his mum sighed.
"What do you mean?" Even if Sirius had good intentions, there were things you just didn't do to a friend.
"If you think someone is not acting under their own power, do you ask them about it?" his mum hissed. "What if the one controlling them would hurt them if they knew you knew? I understand why he did it. I might do the same." She still sounded angry, though.
"Didn't Dumbledore tell him whatever got him thinking that, though?" Harry asked. "Dumbledore, the same person who obliviated you and basically kidnapped me and lied for years? Why did he listen to Dumbledore?"
"It's… ugh, I hate this." His mum slithered over to lay beside his crossed legs. "If you put aside that Dumbledore was his source, looking solely at what he must have thought was going on based on his questions, it was inarguably the right thing to do, given all of the things he did not know, things I did not tell him or anyone. But I don't want to forgive him. Not for ambushing me somewhere I felt safe. Not for him doing it. I trusted him."
That was a lot trickier. Harry wished he had something meaningful to say, but if it was him he would…
He didn't know what he would do either. Maybe Ginny would know; she had been where Taylor was, sort of, and she had actually been possessed.
"Ginny would have appreciated me sneaking up on her and stunning her back when Tom was running around in her body," he said aloud. "Even if I scared her or broke her trust. And if it was that or letting Tom hurt her, or hurt other people using her, I know what I would do. But if I was wrong and it was all her, then she might not like me very much after."
"You see… It is justified. Sometimes. And the cost of missing a real problem is much higher than that of jumping the gun." His mum hissed, a wordless hiss of frustration. "He is probably moping around that miserable townhouse right now, regretting everything. Even though he was, all things considered, right to check. If I was being practical, I would forgive him right now so that if I ever am possessed or not in control of myself, and he suspects, he does not hesitate to do it again. But I don't want to do that."
"Maybe you should just stay away from him for a while," Harry suggested. She didn't need Sirius.
"I did that. Once. With my father. A while turned into 'indefinitely', and when we eventually reconnected… it was never the same. Not really. I had changed too much." Harry got the impression she had decided on something; she straightened and slithered off his bed, down to the floor. "I won't go back now. I will take some time to myself. But I will confront him about it soon. Before the third task. Thank you."
"I don't think I helped very much," Harry admitted.
"You helped more than you know." She twisted around to look at him. "Now go to bed. It's a school night."
He laughed and threw his pillow at her as she left. Then he went and picked it up, because he was really tired and he had Potions first thing in the morning.
Sirius felt like he had kicked a dog, which was especially ironic as he was currently a dog who had quite literally been kicked.
He moped around a bitterly ugly little excuse for a park near Grimmauld Place, a dog with a very bruised rib and a guilty conscience. He didn't want to talk to anyone, or be approached, or anything of the sort, so he was wandering around in his canine form. It was socially acceptable for him to growl at anyone who approached him this way.
Taylor had left, after that well-deserved beating, and she hadn't come back. Two weeks of her continued absence and counting was driving home how much her occasional presence made Grimmauld bearable. She was the only one who came around. Remus certainly didn't, though he had sent an owl asking when the library would be ready.
Sirius didn't particularly want to see Remus. He was on Dumbledore's side, and Dumbledore was the one who had gotten him into this mess. Sirius could and would put that aside to play the part of the wholehearted ally if Remus came around, because whether or not Taylor believed it of him he was not going to betray her and her extradimensional assistant, but not now. Not while he could avoid it.
In the meantime, he was moping. There was an appeal to it, Sirius supposed. Blaming oneself and not doing anything because it was all already ruined. No guilt over not making an effort if making an effort was futile from the start. Ironically, he would have said that was a Remus thing; he'd done it back with that mistake involving Snape and a full moon.
That one was Sirius' fault, too. Maybe he had been lucky to go this long before making a friendship-endangering mistake. He was overdue one.
He stopped to mark a scrubby tree. Anything to postpone going back to Grimmauld Place. It was empty, and it wasn't going to get better. Taylor wouldn't be there. It would just be him, his mother's portrait, that insufferable hat, and all the elf heads mounted on the wall. Hardly a good time.
At least Kreacher was gone. The miserable old elf had chosen to interpret his order about cleaning the house 'and nothing else' to mean no eating or drinking, and ignominiously expired in his grubby little cupboard before Sirius remembered his existence.
Good riddance.
It didn't help Grimmauld Place's ambiance any, though. That building was so steeped in dark magic that it probably fed off of death and betrayal. He had provided it with more of both since moving in.
Sirius moped his way back to Grimmauld place once it got dark, surrendering to the inevitable. Sleeping in his old room was better than sleeping in a ditch or hotel somewhere, and he didn't feel like getting drunk and taking the decision of where to sleep out of his own hands. He'd probably wind up doing something stupid and getting killed in a back-alley brawl.
He shifted back to human in an alleyway, tromped up to the front door of his least favorite building, and stomped past his mother's ugly portrait.
The curtains sprang open, and the old bat's face was already red in anticipation of a screeching, but he yelled first. "Shut the fuck up, you stupid, inbred, sanctimonious, constipated, half-wit half-sized half-human harridan!"
Her face turned an ugly shade of purple, but her mouth was still open and he imagined he could see bile still bubbling up in the back of her throat, so he drew a deep breath to keep going–
The curtains were yanked shut by invisible hands, and he heard a faint buzzing behind him in the sudden silence.
"Sirius."
He fully expected a recreation of their first meeting, terrifying wall of bugs and all, but when he turned she was just standing there in the doorway. A raincoat draped her lean form, one sleeve hanging empty. She didn't look angry, though he had noticed that when she was at her most terrifying she often looked like she was genuinely bored, so her lack of visible anger now was either a good sign or a very bad one.
"Deadly," he said, and then he silently cursed himself for his incessantly loose tongue.
"Never trick, ambush, drug, or trap me in this building again, or my house for that matter." She stepped inside, wiping her boots off on the mat. "I mean it. No matter what. If you need to check me for possession without prior warning, hit me when I'm walking to my car, or at the store, or even at work. Not where I feel safe."
She smiled at him, but it was a smile totally devoid of warmth. "Next time, you might not get me so easily. You might not live through it, either."
Had he once thought she didn't rate very highly on his warped terror scale? Forget that, she was an eleven out of ten. He would even say it was hot if he didn't still have vivid memories of flies forcing their way up his nose.
"I won't ever do it again," he promised.
"You'll do it if you think you have to, and if I'm ever possessed or under the Imperius curse I hope you notice in time to give a repeat performance," she said coldly as she passed him in the hallway. "But not here or in my home."
"Like I said, I won't." He followed her into the living room. "I'm really sorry–"
"For listening to Dumbledore," she interrupted. "That's the only thing you have to be sorry about. What did he tell you?" She pointedly took a pinch of Floo powder and held it in one hand, while standing right next to the fireplace.
The total lack of trust hit him like a dagger to the gut, but it was no less than he deserved. "He called me and Remus in, and said that he needed our help," he explained, giving her nothing but the truth. "As it turns out, whenever someone uses legilimency on you, they get a mindful of your," he lifted his hands to do a quotation gesture, "Ravenclaw friend's eccentricities and your memories. He was a bit suspicious of you having Harry," which he now noticed didn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of Taylor's story, "and when he saw all of that…"
"He decided to obliviate me?" she asked.
"Well, no, not right away," Sirius said. "I'm not defending him, but he tried to figure out what was up with you first, and he landed on Summoning as the only possible explanation. Some Summoned things can spread by close contact or interaction or any number of possible conditions-"
"Fuck." Taylor scowled at nothing, peculiarly angry. "Fuck. Of course. That makes too much sense." She clenched her fist around the Floo powder and punched the solid stone mantelpiece.
"It does?" He didn't know exactly what he had said that made sense, because it had taken him a lot longer to understand Dumbledore's story when he heard it. Maybe he was really good at summarizing?
"What do you do with a danger that could spread by touch, or hearing them speak, or close contact, or just occasional nerve twitches whenever you're around, or a scream, or looking you in the eye?" Taylor asked rhetorically. She walked in front of the fire, then turned around, visibly agitated. "I should have guessed. Him making me forget and then leaving me in place… What methods of transmission was he worried about?"
"All of them?" Sirius guessed. "Legilimency, for sure, and maybe upon death. He didn't know. There's almost nothing on Summoning, just enough that he freaked out. He was an idiot not to ask you–"
"And trigger a suicide condition, or maybe asking 'what's wrong with you' is the trigger for it to spread, or maybe I would be forced to lie if he asked," Taylor interrupted. "No, he couldn't ask. You couldn't ask. Not without me knowing what you suspect. Obliviation doesn't give an explanation as to why, he could just have been a magical kidnapper. If something was waiting to be discovered, Obliviation wouldn't trigger it."
Sirius looked at her as she scowled, then dumped her handful of Floo powder back in the vase. She met his gaze. "I don't like what you did," she said. "What he did is unforgivable. But it wasn't the wrong thing to do."
"Run that by me again," he requested, trying not to get his hopes up.
"He thought I was compromised." She walked over to the chair she often claimed, the nice cushioned leather armchair Sirius had worked hard to clean off once he noticed her using it, since he remembered his mother sitting in it and he couldn't think of anything more likely to stain it to the wooden core. She didn't sit in it, instead opting to perch on one of the arms, still facing him. "Why didn't you come here and tell me what Dumbledore said, so I could explain? You trusted me, but you also lied."
Trusted. Like he didn't trust her now. It was the other way around, and he deserved it. Aside from keeping an eye on her to make sure her shard wasn't a filthy liar, he trusted her completely. Now that he knew what was going on. "If it wasn't really you in there… how could I have been sure asking you wouldn't set it off?"
"How could you be sure questioning me under Veritaserum wouldn't set it off?" she pressed.
"I couldn't," he said honestly, "but I only half believed Dumbledore might be onto something, and I had to do something to prove him wrong. I just took precautions in case he was right."
"The difference is you were reckless enough to do something, instead of biding your time," she said. "That's the only difference."
"Hey, hold on," he objected. "That's not the only difference between me and him. I didn't lie to Harry. I didn't obliviate you. I didn't plan to obliviate you, even if he was right. If you were in danger I was going to do everything in my power to save you, I would have brought Harry in on it, the whole deal. Not sitting around doing research and nothing else!" Admittedly, Dumbledore's way was a lot safer for the world while there was a chance acting directly could antagonize an otherwise dormant danger, but… "If your shard was a monstrous ever-spreading thing like the black unicorn Dumbledore told me about, my approach might have had some very big consequences, but… go big or go home?" he offered. "I didn't want him to be right. It just wasn't something I could ignore, either."
Taylor's shoulders slumped. "Like I said. It wasn't wrong. But it still hurt, coming from you."
"I know," he said. "And I knew it would, going in," he added, compelled to give her the full truth. She had done him the huge favor of not having the conversation with him drugged to the gills with Veritaserum, so he would be truthful on his own. "If it helps, I felt like shit every step of the way and I'll make it up to you any way you want."
"Ten years ago, this would have been it, no matter how well-meaning you were or sorry you are now," she told him. "I don't trust easily. We'd never get back to what we had before."
"What about now?" he asked.
"We'll see." She looked away from him. "I make no promises. But allies are hard to come by for me right now… and friends harder still. I'm not the same person I was back then. We'll stay the course for now. Harry is more important."
"Harry is important, but I don't want my fuck-up to ruin anything else," Sirius objected. "That's important too. If you need to stay away from me for a while–"
"That doesn't help." She shook her head. "Really, it doesn't. Besides, we have a whole collection of different lies and plans on the go that will fail if we can't work together to maintain them. You getting custody of Harry, Moody thinking I'm working for you to assess Hogwarts security, the murmurs of a possible Death Eater resurgence, Barty being on the loose, now you working for Dumbledore…"
"So it's an alliance of necessity, then." Damn if that didn't sting more than it should.
"No," she said, surprising him. "Don't be an idiot, don't violate my trust again – and I do not mean don't check me for possession or mind-altering influence, I mean don't make it so I can't trust you – and you might have a chance." She shook her head. "I like you more than I should."
He would be lying if he said that didn't make him feel better. Fuck the patented Remus ''everything is pointless so I won't try' attitude, he was going to make this right. If Taylor was willing to try and give him another chance, he wasn't going to waste it.
They sat – well, she perched and he stood – in silence. A brooding, thought-provoking silence.
"Ask," she told him.
"Would it be inappropriate if I offered you a backrub as part of my apology?" he blurted out, as that was one of the things currently crossing the back of his mind. The thought immediately prior to that one had been 'what can I do to make it up to her,' and the thought after it 'probably yes, she's not a touchy person', but of course his stupid brain chose the dumb thought in the middle to express to the world. He smacked himself in the forehead.
Taylor stared at him, her expression unreadable. "Do you think about the things you say at all before they leave your mouth?" she asked.
"No," he said firmly, picking his words carefully to avoid shoving his own foot any further down his throat. "I do not. Feel free to sting me for that. What were you expecting a normal, intelligent person to ask you?"
"About… anything in my past," she said. "You know enough to be curious."
"Do you actually want to tell me?" he asked. "Because after what I did, I'm sure as hell not going to demand answers. I'm willing to take you at your word that I don't need to know."
"It would have averted this whole ordeal if I just told you to begin with," she remarked.
"But you didn't know that it would be relevant to anything, and you didn't tell me, so you probably had good reasons to not want to talk about it," Sirius reasoned. "I figure you're from some other world, one with other humans which is a really cool and simultaneously terrifying concept, and that you fought a fuck-ton of Summoned monsters because that other world didn't have our one's shield, or magic at all… Hell if I know how that worked, but I don't need to know the specifics. You did your usual thing of being bloody terrifying and effective, cut off the head of the snake, probably with your teeth and fingernails if you couldn't use magic–"
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