Sirius Black

Hey, kiddo.

Just checking on you. I know it was a lot to absorb.

Hope you're coping all right.

I think he'd have been pleased to know that we know, actually. Probably not as pleased to know you've fallen in with dangerous criminals and blood-traitors, but pleased that someone will remember why he died and that he chose to use his death as some kind of strike against Voldemort.

He didn't succeed in what he was attempting. But you finished it for him. I know it was hard for you but you managed, which is all anyone could have asked and more.

And I know he would have liked how fitting and poetic it was that it all turned out as it did. The sodding girl's blouse.

Anyway. If you want to talk more, don't stand on ceremony.

Been thinking about you all day.

You'd hardly recognise the house, especially after using it to hold lessons here at Easter hols. And everything we've had to do to make it safe for Bea. Couple days ago she decided to pull herself up by the curtains in the parlour - you remember the ones Mother loved and Father thought were far too dark for the room - and the bottom of the drape tore away in Bea's hands. Went right back down on her bum, started to sniffle a bit but then looked at the fabric in her hands and stuffed a corner in her mouth instead. (And then spit it out in disgust. With quite a commentary on how it tasted.) Dora kept trying to look stern and busting out laughing instead. I didn't even bother with the looking stern part. I could just imagine how Mother would have shrieked about it. (Well, Kreacher did a fair impression for us, when he saw the uneven rags, anyway.) Makes me wish we'd taken a knife to the bloody things years ago. Father might not even have punished us too harshly, either - he hated those awful drapes, anyway.


Say. If you were our locket, where would you have hidden yourself? I looked on your bookshelves and in your bedside table drawer but I couldn't get much further. Too many ... dust balls. I'm not giving Kreacher the satisfaction of asking about it, either. But she's asked again. It's almost as if it wants to stay lost just so Miss Parkinson can accuse me of not looking hard enough.

She's got some idea she can find you with the lock of hair. Or what's left of you, I guess, to put it more accurately. Not sure that's a clever idea - or well, perhaps it is but I suppose I'm not sure she really wants the answer she might get.


Probably going to get a proper teasing, writing to you like this. At least I'm not including song lyrics and poems, Mordred, you couldn't pay me to be 16 again for all the salamanders in Arabia.

Still. Teasing or not: Three years.

Remus says it was already too late by then, you know. That nothing I could've said those last two years would have made a difference. It's not those two years, though, that were the problem.

I suppose what bothers me the most is that even at the end, when you were like a man drowning, you continually refused to take the hand I offered. So maybe Remus is right and this was always the way it had to be.

But.

The thing is I know that people can change. Opinions evolve. Mac's have done, since he's come to work with the Order. And even bloody Snivellus can't deny that the Lilys and the Hermiones of the world are just as powerful and talented as someone with nine generations of magic to the family name. Merlin, apparently even our cousin Draco sodding Malfoy has come to see the futility of the Protectorate. And you did too, even if you were too fucking proud to say so. Or too frightened.

So .. Why? Why disappear or kill yourself or get yourself killed? Just to end your own suffering? Why when you could have just let me help you? Or is this your final revenge, Goblin, for all the times I wouldn't - play with you or listen to you or do whatever you wanted, for making my escape when I could do, and not ever really checking to see if you wanted to come along?

You know, the dead ironic part is she thinks it's a mark of how strong you were. And she thinks she knows you without ever understanding how smug, how superior, how snide or how much of a bastard you could be. But the thing is that it means she can mourn you and the only anger she feels is toward Voldemort for twisting you and breaking you. Not that I don't feel that, too, but I can't seem to separate it from the other anger. Toward you for taking the coward's solution. Toward me for not being more insistent with you - or persistent, take your pick - about your friends and your choices, about Mother and Father and their stupid games. I mean, yes, Voldemort broke you. But they're the ones who malformed you first.

Circe.

I can't even apologise properly. But that's the problem. I'll never be able to apologise because I'll never be able to fix the damage. I'll never have the chance.

Except by making sure he doesn't get another single one of the Blacks. Or anyone else, if I've anything to do with it.

Well?

You wanted to see it.

Let's have it. I mean, I see I've been a right git, as she says (well, from her side) but what now?

Is it good or bad that no matter what she quotes (and Dora, that's Uriah Heap, that last bit), all I can hear whenever she starts on lyrics is 'Go Ask Alice' - and no, not just because Allie's usually my first line of defence when it comes to girls. Because I wish it had been on one of the albums she'd nicked. Perhaps I'll send her a copy of Lewis Carroll, as well.

Happy birthday, little brother.

Least I have the one up there still.

You fucking pillock.