Thicker than Water (Marauders Era)

26 January, 1978 - Atonement

Sirius took only a few moments to shove the notes into Peter's hands and tell the three others to go into the Room of Requirement before he was running after Lavinia, trying to think of a way to fix this. He was not going to make the same mistake he had when she'd received that howler.

Actually, he wasn't entirely sure why he hadn't stepped in sooner, though he had a few guesses. He'd been stunned still and silent by the person standing before him, like something out of a story. An ice queen. She hadn't been the girl he'd known the past several months. The girl he'd known the past year really. She'd been... well. She'd been Lavinia Selwyn. Her mother's daughter. Exactly the person she had been raised to be. And it had terrified him how seamless the transition had been.

Besides which, there had been something almost ethereal about her, a feeling he'd gotten before, when he'd first seen the soft, sad side of her late at night and hardly known how to reconcile it. Of course, where she'd seemed then like a ghost or phantom, tonight she'd seemed like a figure from a legend. A queen facing someone who dared challenge her throne. And she'd been cold and calm and not at all the girl he'd grown so fond of.

In short, she hadn't been at all herself. Which, he supposed, he should have seen coming. Peter had. Peter had realized what somehow Sirius had missed. Faced with people she didn't know and didn't trust, Lavinia reverted back to whatever training had been drilled into her by her mother. He didn't have to look far for why. She knew the facade she put on wasn't that of a good person. So when someone called her names or beat her down, it didn't hurt as much. Because she already knew it was true. And besides, it wasn't her. Just a mask.

Sirius caught up to her quickly enough. For all that she was running, his strides were simply longer and her shorter legs worked against her. They were on the sixth floor when he reached out and caught her, careful to grab her upper arm just in case the suspicions he'd been nursing for months now were correct.

She whirled around at his touch and, breathless from running, faced him with her jaw set and her eyes shining. She looked every bit like she wanted to cry and wasn't going to let herself. It broke his heart to see that. Even after so long she still was hesitant to trust him with her tears.

"Don't," she said, her voice even but tight.

"Don't what?" he asked softly.

"Don't run in here and try to pretend she was wrong or that I wasn't awful. I-" She broke off and closed her eyes, swallowing. "I was," she continued.

"I'm not going to," he replied, his tone gentle, though he didn't release his grip on her arm. He had the terrible feeling that if she ran off right now, she wasn't going to come back. "But for the record," he added, "You were also right."

She blinked at him in evident surprise. "You're not going to," she repeated flatly, ignoring his other comment so completely he wondered if she'd even heard him. "Then why are you here?"

She had asked him that before. On a bad night when she'd walked silent and stoic. That was the first time she'd scared him. He couldn't remember how many times he'd feared for her since then. It was less instances these days and more a constant underlying worry stemming from the knowledge that however many smiles she gave, however often she laughed, underneath it all, she wasn't okay.

"Because you don't get to just walk away," he murmured, repeating the words he'd spoken to her that night on the tower, hoping to remind her that he'd brought her back from an edge then and by Merlin, he would do it again. He would do it as often as it took for her to stop straying so close to the edge.

Her eyes, which had been flicking around the corridor, avoiding his face, stilled and met his and he knew she remembered those words. Indeed, she responded just as she had then: "But what if I want to?" It was the same tone, the same hopelessness and desperation, a plea to come up with a reason to stay. It sent a bolt of fear through him.