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Chapter Text

2015

"What in heaven’s name are you wearing?"

Walburga Black's sharp voice hits Sirius like a whip and he flinches, pausing uncertainly in his task of lacing the aglets of his shoelaces through his big, stomping, fuck-off Solovairs. He glances up briefly at his mother, who is hovering unpleasantly in the doorway of the mudroom that leads to the foyer, but doesn't make eye contact and continues lacing his shoes, focusing on threading the things up as quickly as possible. He briefly wishes slip-on shoes were in any way as cool as boots — it would make it easier to sneak out of the house without being noticed — but they simply aren't.

"It's the last day," he says, aiming for casual and unbothered and likely missing the mark. "Everyone is dressing down for the last day, it's like, a thing."

Walburga scoffs, and Sirius yelps as she yanks him by the ear into a standing position, one shoe half-laced and one foot still in just a sock. "My son will not be graduating school looking like some sort of derelict," she hisses, dragging him along by the ear back into the house, the sharp click of her heels followed by the clumsy stomp-shuffle of Sirius's half-shoed feet being pulled behind echoing through the tall-ceilinged hallways as he attempts not to trip over his laces. "Not only will anyone who is anyone be at your school for the last day’s events, but everyone is coming directly here to the manor once the school day is finished for the graduation gala, and I'll not have you waltzing in not ready for guests! You realize that you are graduating in the same class as the Home Secretary’s son?"

"But everyone is dressing down today!" Sirius whinges as Walburga all but tosses him back into his bedroom by the ear. He tries to rub the stinging pain away once she lets go. "It's a tradition!"

"Tradition! Tradition is looking your part!" Walburga storms across the room, yanks a sharp suit from Sirius's closet, and drapes it over the foot of his bed. "Tradition is not embarrassing your mother and father! You’re lucky that I care enough for you to stop you from humiliating yourself! The Senior Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords will be here!"

Sirius opens his mouth to speak again, but she smacks him sharply across the cheek with her open hand. She doesn't hit him particularly hard, but it does sting, and he looks away from her and pulls his lips between his teeth, fighting his every instinct not to talk back, because he knows she'll hit harder next time.

"Keep your sass to yourself. Change. Now."

Sirius takes a deep breath, rolls his shoulders, and begins changing into the suit. She waits until she's sure he's doing it, arms crossed primly and mouth pinched in anger, before giving him privacy.

***

"You look a right twat," Benjy says later, and Sirius shoves him hard enough that he stumbles back and his shoe slips in the mud of the bank of the river behind the rowing shed. "Augh, you prick!" he grumbles once he regains his balance, and drags his shoe along the grass in an attempt to clean the mud off.

"I know I do," Sirius groans, letting his head fall back in irritation. It just makes him more annoyed, feeling the stiff collar of his oxford and his suit jacket dig into the back of his neck. He sighs up at the overcast sky in annoyance before giving in to his craving and pulling a pack of fags from his breast pocket. He puts one between his lips then tosses the whole box over to Benjy so he can take his own. "But don’t you know, the bloody Queen’s housemaid’s brother is to be in attendance!” He says, really emphasizing the posh RP accent, going mockingly nasally in his delivery. He sighs. “I think I'm never going to speak to any of them again once I go to uni."

Benjy snatches the lighter from Sirius's hands once he's done lighting his cigarette, and lights his own.

"Well, except Reg, obviously," Sirius adds around a puff of smoke.

"At least you look like James Bond pulling these out," Benjy says, shaking the cigarette box so that the few left inside rattle softly before handing it back to Sirius, who puts them back into his inner breast pocket with a toothy grin.

"Does that make you Pussy Galore?"

"Watch it, I'm stronger than you, you'll wind up in the middle of the river," Benjy laughs, and sinks down onto the overturned rowboat with a hole in the bottom that's been sitting behind this shed waiting for maintenance going on three years now.

Sirius snickers and drops down next to him. The boat creaks precariously for a moment before choosing, in the end, not to collapse under their weight. "That'll show old Wally, I'll saunter right on into her fancy 'Graduation Gala'—" he accentuates this with enthusiastic jazz hands "—covered in mud and smelling like fish. She'll love it."

They sit in comfortable silence, smoking and watching the ducks float languidly along with the current of the river that runs through the school grounds. The air feels strange, tinged with the melancholy that comes in transitionary periods– little emotional whirlwinds between something ending and something new beginning.

"You're coming tonight, right? I can't be at this thing alone," Sirius asks eventually, watching a duck attempt to catch something swimming just below the surface of the water.

"Yeah, 'course," Benjy says. "Should I bring the stink bombs?"

Sirius cackles, "Of course you should, if you want Wally to lit'rally chop your bollocks off. There is no way she's letting you in there without emptying your pockets first."

"I can probably fit one in my pants," Benjy says.

"I wouldn't put a strip search past her."

"Well, we'll figure something else out. Maybe we can replace the hors d'oeuvres with that fancy Pot Pourri she keeps in the bathrooms."

Sirius doubles over laughing at the mental image of Walburga and Orion's fancy friends and the other rich parents of the other kids that go to this school pretending to enjoy the taste of potpourri lest they be seen as uncultured swine for not understanding this new exotic delicacy. "We'll spread a rumor that they were prepared by the guy that opened that fancy Michelin-starred French restaurant near the theater last year, they'll never have the bollocks to say it's rank!"

Benjy snorts and collapses against Sirius in laughter. "They'll never! We'll have them chewing on pine cones if we say it's avant garde gastro art."

The two of them laugh for far longer than the joke really warrants, probably, but even bad jokes are hilarious when Benjy tells them. Eventually, they simmer down into the occasional giggle and then back to contemplative silence. The sound of the rowing team doing field drills drifts over from the football pitch down the way. The big bell in the central tower of the main school building tolls the hour, but Sirius doesn't feel any particular rush to get to his final class of secondary school. What are they going to do, give him detention?

Silently, Benjy leans over and nudges him with his shoulder to get his attention. Sirius turns to face him and finds him a lot closer than he expected, so he leans away slightly to see him wiggling his lighter at him. Sirius holds his palm flat and Benjy drops it into his hand. He fiddles with it for a moment, flicking the metal top of it open and closed repeatedly with a satisfying click. Benjy flicks the hand with the lighter in it to get him to stop. "You're so annoying," he mumbles, fondly.

Sirius pauses for a moment, then turns to face Benjy. "You're not going to forget me, are you? At Hull or whatever."

Benjy rolls his eyes, "You know it's Oxford!"

Sirius grins.

"How can I forget you? You're so annoying that you're unforgettable," Benjy says, and Sirius laughs. "Anyway, you're more likely to forget me all the way in 'New York City'."

"Was that meant to be an American accent?"

"Of course! I'm from Brooklyn, Queens in New York, New York!" Benjy says, in the same awful attempt at sounding like he was from New York.

"That is not where Brooklyn is."

"I would know, I'm from there!"

Sirius laughs and, as though possessed, tips forward and presses a kiss onto Benjy's smiling lips.

Benjy's smile drops instantly and he freezes. Sirius leans away again and, at the look he sees on Benjy's face, scoots farther away from him. "Oh, uh. Sorry, I don't know why—" He starts, but is interrupted by a string of hooting and hollering from the river. Sirius startles and his attention, along with Benjy's, snaps to the rowboat full of screaming row crew boys on their send-off row.

"I bloody well knew you were a poofter, Black!" Avery yells from the rowboat, none of the cackling boys seeming to lose their rowing cadence as they zoom past Sirius and Benjy, their laughter slowly fading into the distance.

"F-fuck," Sirius spits, stumbling over his words, and turns back to Benjy, who is watching him a little bit slack jawed, with shock in his eyes. "Fuck, Benj, I'm so sorry I didn't see them and— I don't know why I even did that, and I thought maybe— I-I just, uh—" He scrambles to find some sort of reason for what he did but he doesn't even know himself why he did it.

Benjy puts him out of his misery and puts his hand on his shoulder. "It's alright, mate," he says, "I don't give a toss about what Avery thinks anyway, it's okay."

Sirius licks his lips but finds his mouth is dry as the desert so it doesn't help his chapped lips much (have they always been this chapped or is the panic making him wither away?) "Oh, okay," he says, weakly, and nods. "Yeah. Me neither."

"But, um, listen, I don't, uh, like you like that," Benjy says, not quite making eye contact anymore. "I'm into, y'know, birds."

"Oh, right, yeah. 'Course, yeah, I know that," Sirius says, trying to sound nonchalant and also‌ manly. He isn't sure why he feels the need to drop his voice like that, and after he does it, he makes a face to himself and shakes his head to knock himself out of the weird affectation.

"Yeah, so uh…" Benjy trails off, clearly searching for something to say but not sure how to say it. Sirius springs up to his feet before Benjy can figure it out and takes a few long steps backwards, away from him, trying to look casual.

"Yeah, um, we should get to class, prob'ly," he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. He clears his throat and tosses the butt of his cigarette into the river. He waits for Benjy to stand up to follow but doesn't wait for him to catch up before he walks back to the main school building.

***

Sirius slips out of class before the final bell and sneaks past the line of Mercedes, BMWs and Lexuses waiting to pick up the newly graduated class. Everyone will be walking to get their diplomas tomorrow, but Sirius is suddenly finding himself extremely unenthusiastic about returning to the building, even if there will be no classes. In fact, he feels an extreme anxiety propelling him to leave as soon as humanly possible.

He spots his family's butler, Edmund Kreacher, sitting in the Rolls Royce near the front of the queue of parents, and dives behind a hedgerow to avoid being spotted. Sneaking around the side of the school, through a broken board in the fence that maintenance has never noticed because it's hidden behind brambles, he slips out onto the street on the opposite side. He brushes leaves off his suit and begins to walk home.

Kreach will live. He needs a walk. And the later to the party he is, at this point, the better for his mental health. He pulls another cigarette out of his pocket and takes a long drag once it's lit, blowing it straight up into the misty sky, feeling maudlin.

Why on earth did he do that? Why did he have to kiss Benjy? It was completely unpremeditated, completely unexpected even to himself, completely bloody stupid! He just saw Benjy's stupid cute laughing face so close to his and…and he did it! And what did he expect? For Benjy to say "Oh, yeah, Sirius, that was great, let's be long distance, international boyfriends when we get to uni, it'll be great." No, of course not!

Well, it wasn't entirely unfounded. It's not like Benjy wasn't ever affectionate with him. He was always shoving him and punching his arm and flicking his nose and things like that, and always calling him annoying and…God, Sirius feels so stupid. There's never been a stupider person. This was even stupider than the time that Evangeline Ruff asked him out on a date and he laughed in her face because he thought she was joking and made her cry.

He groans and rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes, his fag hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

"Well, look who it is, boys!"

Sirius snaps his head around in time to see Avery and two of his goons stepping out of an Audi TT. Well, Avery and Goyle step out of it; Carrow has to crawl out of the tiny back seat from behind the pushed-forward passenger seat of the two-door coupe in a way that is impossible to do without looking a little bit silly, especially for a man his size.

Sirius sighs, rolls his eyes, and keeps walking. "Leave me alone, Avery."

"Where's your li'l boyfriend, Black?" Avery quips, picking up his pace to walk beside Sirius, who scowls at him, and at Goyle when he flanks his other side.

"Fucking your mum, probably," Sirius says, as he ashes his cigarette over Avery's shoes. Avery scoffs, affronted, and sticks his wingtip out to trip Sirius. Sirius just barely spins and dodges it and manages to regain his balance, but just as he does, Goyle nails him directly in his left eye with a mean right hook and sends him sprawling arse-down in someone's front garden. "Jesus Christ, Goyle!" Sirius spits, grasping at his temple and looking down at his hand to find some blood there.

Avery chortles above him and leans into his face. "You didn't have to go there, Black, we was just bein' friendly!"

"Yeah, friendly as a snake," Sirius mutters, scooting back on his bum to get away from Avery's face and waving him away like a bad smell. "Get your nasty breath out of my face, you troll."

Avery digs in a sharp kick at the ground beside Sirius and sends clods of grass and dirt flying all over his clothes.

"Fuck me," Sirius rolls his eyes (which hurts) and heaves a sigh, flopping back to lay flat in the grass. He gives up.

"See you at your mum's li'l party, Sirius ," Avery says, putting a highly disrespectful mocking tone on Sirius's name.

Sirius flips him the bird with both hands from where he's laying as he and Goyle walk off to catch back up with Carrow at the car. Sirius sits up just in time to see Carrow attempting to squeeze himself back into the bucket seats in the back of the car. He snorts humorlessly, heaves himself back up, and keeps walking.

By the time he makes it back to the front gate of Grimmauld Place, his left eye is completely swollen shut. Fuck those neanderthals, and fuck the entire sport of rowing. To be safe, fuck that rowing shed, too.

Sirius looks down at himself and sighs. There is no saving this. He brushes what dirt he can off of his dark grey suit, but it isn't dark grey enough to hide the brown smudges of dirt that have embedded themselves into the fabric. He takes off his jacket and slings it over his shoulder. There is a triangular stain of dirt and grass in the center of his chest, where the jacket left his oxford shirt exposed, but it'll have to do. He pushes his hair forward over his left eye as much as he can, adjusts his tie, and tries to walk as nonchalantly as possible into the house.

"What is this filth!" Walburga's shrill voice pierces his ears like an arrow almost the second he steps foot inside, and his shoulders instinctively shoot up around his ears. "Upstairs. Now!" She smacks the back of his head hard enough that he sees stars, and he wonders if he might not have a concussion as he stumbles his way up the stairs to his room, followed steadily by Walburga's sharp clacking heels as though she were a persistence predator. She probably is.

He turns to face her once he makes it to the center of his room, but he can't look her in the eyes, and instead keeps his gaze fixed on the intricate flowers that are carved into the wooden baseboards along the walls behind her. He's not sure what to say, so he doesn't say anything.

"One thing, I requested one thing from you— not to embarrass me— and what have you done?!" Walburga shrieks, and Sirius shrinks back a few steps until his back hits his dresser. Walburga pinches the bridge of her nose with her perfectly manicured blood-red fingertips and takes a deep breath, then hisses through gritted teeth, "What, pray tell, happened on the last day of classes that left you lacking an eye and, evidently, buried in soil!"

Sirius opens his mouth to speak but suddenly no words come to him. He grimaces and shakes his head, shrugs sharply.

"How dare you — when you knew that guests would be here!" She fumes, glancing at the door as if remembering herself for the first time that people were, indeed, in the house already, and might be overhearing these dramatics. "You pull yourself together, immediately!"

She walks out of his room and slams the door, and Sirius hears her storming off in the direction of her and Orion's bedroom suite. He breathes out a shuddering breath and turns to look at himself for the first time in the full-length mirror nailed into the wall between his bedroom's two windows. He looks absolutely awful, dark blood dried down the side of his face, his hair a complete mess, his clothes rumpled and dirty. He lets the jacket in his hands fall to the floor and squeezes his one working eye shut and tries to simply breathe for a moment.

Just then Walburga yanks the door open again. He hadn't noticed her steps this time, so he jumps and turns to face her again. She throws a small pot of concealer onto his bed. "Cover it up." She says, coldly and slams the door shut again. He hears her footsteps walk, more calmly this time, toward the staircase leading to the main entryway. He sinks down onto his bed and stares at the ceiling.

***

Twenty minutes later, and he knows he's pushing it. Any minute, Walburga or Orion will notice that he still hasn't come downstairs and will come up looking for him. He's showered, changed into a clean suit, fixed his hair, and slathered nearly the entire pot of his mother's concealer onto his eye. When he first got home it was an angry, swollen red, but now a deep blue and green has begun blooming around the edges and it's overpowering the concealer quite spectacularly. It doesn't help that his mother is a good two shades lighter than him in skin tone, so his eye looks like it has its own personal spotlight pointed directly onto it, the star of the show. This is the best he can do without an eye patch, so he steels himself and gives himself a stern look in the mirror. He pokes his mirror self in the chest. "You're almost out of here," he says, solemnly, to his reflection. After another moment, he steps outside.

Downstairs, the gala is in full swing. People are mingling in every common part of the manor, the entire graduating class and their families seem to have shown up. Sirius edges his way around the outside of the festivities until he spots his little brother loitering near the back window and sidles up to him.

"Hey, punk," he says, kicking at Regulus's shiny loafers.

"Hey! I'm not a punk, and you're going to ruin my shoes!" Regulus whines and squats down to scrub at an invisible scuff mark on his shoe where Sirius kicked it. Sirius grins, perhaps a bit more lopsidedly than usual.

"Oh, sorry, I forgot," he says with a shrug.

"Sure," Regulus says flatly.

"Why are you all the way back here?" Sirius asks.

"Because these are all your friends?" Regulus says, looking at Sirius like that was the stupidest question he's ever heard. "My friends aren't graduating for another, like, ten more years?"

"Right, duh."

Regulus appraises him for a long moment then pulls on his arm until Sirius gets the hint and bends over closer to him. "What happened to your eye? It's all puffy and turning blue," he says, and reaches out to poke Sirius's swollen eye, but Sirius catches his wrist and stands up straight again before he can touch it.

Sirius sighs, over-dramatically, and lets his shoulders droop. "You can tell?"

"Uh, yeah, it's pretty obvious to me," Regulus says.

"Well you always have been very observant," Sirius concedes. "I got into a fight with an ogre."

"Those aren't real!"

"Tell that to my eye!" Sirius says, pointing at his eye for emphasis. "He knocked me straight on my arse!"

"Sirius! Father's going to hear you cussing," Regulus hisses, slightly panicked, clutching Sirius's hand close to his chest and glancing around furtively for their parents as Sirius sniggers. He uses Regulus's grip on him to pull him in against his hip and wrap his arms around Regulus's shoulders from behind.

"Oh, it's alright, they're both busy schmoozing with the other parents," Sirius says, swaying the two of them gently back and forth. "Do you wanna sneak out and jump off the roof?"

"No!" Regulus says, trying to look up to see Sirius's face behind him.

"It could be fun, we can aim for the foliage!" Sirius pokes Regulus in the sides until he starts squirming and laughing.

"I don't want to jump off the roof! Sirius sto-ho-hop," he laughs, trying to pull Sirius's hands away from his sides. Failing that technique, he takes to waving his hands up in Sirius's face and trying to push him away. Sirius cranes his head back so that Regulus can't reach his sore eye.

"But what if we—"

"Sirius."

The laughter immediately stops and Regulus takes two big steps away from Sirius, primly fixing his button-up shirt. Sirius watches Regulus's face lose all semblance of a smile and sighs, tucking his hands into his pockets and straightening his back. "Father."

"It is bad enough that you are starting fights with your classmates, do not now bring that nonsense in here to your younger brother," Orion Black says, tone clipped, watching Sirius down the line of his nose.

Sirius's eyes — rather, eye — snaps up to meet his father's gaze for the first time. "I didn't start anything!" He begins, raising his voice, but at the rise of Orion's eyebrow he simmers down slightly. "I was just walking—"

"And speaking of which," Orion says, speaking over Sirius. Sirius stops talking as soon as he does. "You left Mr. Kreacher waiting for you without a single word as to your whereabouts, and for what? To participate in some tomfoolery?"

Sirius huffs out a frustrated breath, "No, I—"

"Not another word!" Orion says, cold and sharp. Sirius purses his lips and looks somewhere just above his father's forehead. "We nearly had to have the authorities involved because you can't be bothered to have a shred of common courtesy to answer your telephone when called."

Sirius curses himself inwardly. He knew he should have texted Kreach or something before sneaking out, but the prospect of his crotchety old arse sitting there waiting for an hour was too funny to pass up. It may not have been worth it.

"I don't want another peep out of you until you leave for New York in August," Orion says, leaning marginally toward Sirius in a way that makes Sirius feel suffocated. He takes a small step away and nods sharply. He catches Regulus's eye, watching him from behind his father with a worried crinkle in his brow, and the look on his face rekindles the periodic daydream he's been having from the day he decided to apply to universities in the states, to take Reggie with him and keep him happy and full of candy bars for the rest of his life.

"Oi, Black, fancy meeting you here," Avery's grating voice hits Sirius like gravel to the punched-in face, and he rolls his last functional eye as he walks up. "Nice face— Oh, Mr. Black!" Avery has never been the brightest bulb. "You have a lovely home."

"Mr. Avery," Orion says curtly.

Avery fidgets nervously for a moment and glances around the room awkwardly. "Well, I'll be getting back to the party," he says. He turns to Sirius, "Black. I'm glad my years of catching you snogging blokes behind the rowing shed have finally come to an end. Cheers!" And with that, he walks off.

Sirius winces and lets his head fall back with a sigh, squeezing his one good eye shut and scowling in frustration. He couldn't just fucking walk away, could he.

"Sirius," Orion growls, his voice low and dangerous.

"It was just…the one time…" Sirius mutters, weakly, as if that makes it any better.

There is a long moment in which Orion says nothing, and Sirius can't bring himself to look up at him or even at Regulus, for fear of what he'd see on his face. He hears his father take a deep breath and exhale it, then takes Sirius calmly by the elbow. His movements are calm, at least, but the painful vice grip he is digging into Sirius's arm betrays his real feelings.

"You will go upstairs and stay there until you are told you can come out. You will be leaving for New York this week. You will be sharing a dorm with the Malfoy boy, and he will keep an eye on you and tell me if you step out of line. Until the semester starts, you will be staying at the brownstone on Ninth Street with Kreacher. You will go to classes, and you will come home, and you will do nothing else. Do you understand me?"

"But—"

"Do you understand me!?"

"Y-yeah, yes, sir, I understand,"  Sirius mumbles.

In his room, Sirius rips the suit off of his body as if it's strangling him and lets it fall to the floor, until he's in just his vest and pants. He grabs the thick duvet and a pillow from his bed and drags it into the ensuite bathroom, leaving a trail of various bedding accoutrements behind him, slams the door shut and locks it. They aren't allowed to have locks on their bedroom doors, but luckily his parents aren't crazy enough to disallow one on the loos, at least. He climbs into the big clawfoot tub on the opposite end of the room and wraps himself in a nest of feather duvet, burying his face in his pillow, and tries to calm down.

He's almost out. He's almost out. He's almost out.

After a long time, his heart finally stops pounding in his ears, and his breathing calms. He takes another deep breath and digs his phone out of wherever it ended up tangled in the duvet, to find a text from Benjy.