A Marauder's Guide to Falling in Love

Chapter Twenty Six

"You know that he has temper problems sometimes, right?"

Marlene glanced up from her textbook in the library and was almost mortified to discover that James was standing at the foot of her table. In all her years at Hogwarts she had never seen him in the library before and it was the last place she had expected to be ambushed.

"I don't really care Potter," she said dryly and averted her gaze back towards the same sentence she had been reading. Except that her focus had deplored from the content of her book now and it was with growing irritability that she realized James had managed to divert her thoughts back on to Sirius. She flushed with irritation as she realized she was actually curious why James had decided to pay her a visit.

It had been a week since she had stormed off from their spot at the great lake and she had been initially annoyed that he hadn't attempted to chase after her. She had hastily broken up with the boy that she had been pining after for months in the heat of the moment and she was constantly questioning whether or not it had been the right decision.

When Lily and Mary had asked her about it she had lied and said he had been cheating on her. She knew that it was absolutely the wrong thing to say but she had been so irritated with him that it was the first thing that shot out of her mouth. After all, she couldn't possibly tell the girls the actual truth.

"You should care," he said innocently before sinking into the chair next to her. She shrugged her shoulders uncomfortably and tried to drown him out but the words on the page suddenly didn't seem to make much sense and she couldn't seem to move past the same sentence she had been focused on when he had first arrived. "Sirius has been miserable all week. He told us what happened – yes, he told Remus too so Remus is fully aware that you know about his furry little problem."

Marlene couldn't help herself; she let out a small smile at his irony.

"Sirius has always struggled with knowing when to shut his mouth. He's constantly saying things he doesn't mean because he likes to provoke people. When you come from the house of Black and you spend as much time as we do provoking the Slytherins, it becomes almost a natural defense to shut out the people you care about. I daresay that his annoyance with you over the whole matter stems greatly from his stubbornness."

"Right," Marlene's smile had disappeared and she was trying to sort out sense of what she had just been told. "So you want me to believe that Sirius, frustrated with his own problems, took it out on me and then when I budded my way into the problem because Sirius had pushed me away that he got even more defensive and pushed me away even further? And I'm supposed to believe that this is, in actual fact, a sign of endearment, that Sirius cares about me so much that he would rather ignore me in the hallways and act like I don't exist than step foot into the library and tell me this himself?"

"Er – " James looked doubtful. "Yes?"

"You can do better than that Potter."

"Look," he said with a sigh, "I know Sirius really well. He gets moody when he's upset about something. Maybe he hasn't outright said he's pining away over the breakup but I haven't ever seen him quite this miserable before. Even if he hasn't attempted to reconcile with you, I know that it's all he's been thinking about."

"What about last week?" Marlene couldn't help her sarcasm that laced her rhetorical question.

"No, last week he was irritable. This week he's just downright depressing," James said with a furrowed brow. "Snape made him extremely heated. Sirius acts out; he avoids people, he doesn't talk, he gets snappish. It's just how he deals with his frustrations. Eventually, he just gets over it."

"So that's supposed to explain why he felt the sudden urge to put Snape in a situation where he was nearly killed?!"

"I never said that it was an appropriate way of dealing with things," James said profoundly. He glanced around nervously as if to check that nobody was within ear shot of their conversation. "Sirius regrets that decision more than you could possibly ever know. I imagine it will be a decision that haunts him for the rest of his life. He's already being punished enough as it is, do you really think it's appropriate that you punish him for it too? This is an all new miserable. It's greater than the time that he ran away from home to come live with me, it's greater than when he lashed out in his jealously when you started dating Aubrey, and I can assure you it is much greater than last week when you think he was avoiding you because he wanted to break up with you. The last thing that Sirius wanted was to break up and unfortunately you didn't give him much choice in that matter."