GOOD DOG || Sirius Black

(Forty One: The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black)

"So."

Alex narrowed her eyes at Sirius Black. She was currently lying on the Lupin's sofa, engaging in the never-ending war against predictive text in order to get a message to Severus Snape on the Nokia brick Remus' parents had been so kind as to provide her with. Sirius, meanwhile, was leaning his crossed arms on the back of the settee with an expression of enormous trepidation.

"So?" Alex asked, letting the phone flop onto her stomach.

"Remus is out." Sirius noted, "And so are his parents. And it's coming up to six."

Alex raised her eyebrows, "What's your point?"

"They left some pasta." Sirius said slowly.

Alex's brows were almost hiding in her hairline by this point, "Are you asking me to make your tea for you?"

"No. Maybe. Yes?" Sirius winced as if he was expecting an incoming punch, "But it's not because you're a girl or anything."

Alex pulled herself into a sitting position, cross-legged and facing the wrong way so that she could look up at Sirius with an expression that properly conveyed her current danger level, "Oh really?"

"I, um..." Sirius looked down, and Alex caught herself hiding a grin- Was he embarrassed? "I don't know how to cook. Anything actually."

"And you think I do?" Alex responded.

Oh the joys of being brought up a pureblood. They locked eyes to form one simple line of communication that could be understood, in linguistic terms, as the singular word, Shit.

Sirius looked mildly horrified, "You can't cook either?"

Alex shook her head in a mute representation of their sheer amount of fucked-ness.

"Right. Okay then." Sirius nodded, as if convincing himself, "We'll just have to do this together."

Alex got to her feet, turning towards the kitchen with an expression of fear that she knew was written all over her face, "It can't be that hard."

"We can Google it." Sirius moved to stand next to her, and Alex heard the same nerves reflected in his voice.

Neither one of them moved. Alex had the feeling that the expressions of determination on their faces, matched with the battle-ready stances that they had instinctively fallen into would have seemed pretty badass, like a poster for a superhero movie, if they hadn't been stood in their mate's living room and the demon they were battling wasn't a pot full of pasta and a plastic Tupperware container with bolognaise in.

"Sirius Black in a kitchen." Alex said, if only to diffuse some of the tension, "One of the four signs of the apocalypse."

Sirius snorted, "I bet you can't do any better."

"Is that a dare I hear?" Alex slowly turned her head to look at Sirius as he did the same. Once again, a line of understanding shot between them.

It was Sirius who lay down the rules of the challenge, "Make each other's food, loser has to do the washing up?"

Alex grinned, "You're on."

As if those two words broke whatever spell they were under, the teenagers burst into the kitchen, grabbing pots and pans that they didn't actually understand the use for, wrestling for control of the singular packet of pasta, grabbing the microwave manual from the shelf and quickly discarding it upon the realisation that the entire thing was written in Arabic (which seemed like quite a random language to choose, but Alex was too busy emptying the cupboards of useful-looking jars to care).