For the Love of Sirius

"Be careful."

Those are the last words I said to Sirius. Not anything profound, but something I've always said to him throughout all the years we've known each other. In fact, once he told me that maybe we should just make a recording of me saying "Be careful Sirius," so I would never have to say it ever again. At the time, we laughed about it, but now I can't help but wonder, maybe if I had done that, he would've been more careful. He wouldn't have died.

I can't take that blame for his death though. No one can. As Dumbledore told me, the blame is shared, and ultimately, it was Sirius' choice to leave Grimmauld Place. And who can blame him? Who could fault him for wanting to be with his godson? I certainly can't, not when I would move mountains just to be with James' son if he ever needed me.

So maybe I wasn't there enough for Harry in the first couple of years of his life. I don't deny it, and I'm not going to try make excuses for myself, because there are none. It's another thing in my life that I regret, but not as much, I think, for betraying Sirius.

He never thought of it as a betrayal, exactly, of course. After all, we were both young, and a lot more...not innocent, because Sirius could never be that, but more naïve before James and Lily died. But in the original Order of the Phoenix, all anyone knew was that there was a traitor in our midst. No one could be totally sure who the person was, although we never would've guessed it was Peter.

So I began suspecting Sirius.

It wasn't as if I had just randomly decided that the person I loved more than anything else was being a traitor, I had my own reasons. Like how, after graduation, he started pulling away from me. How he started missing nights of wandering around together with Prongs, Wormtail and me, when it was the full moon. I think that it was the fact that he turned up after the full moon, his beautiful blue eyes apologetic, and say, "Oh Merlin, I'm so sorry. I forgot."

I'd sit there, and stare at him, wondering if I was being put aside for Voldemort. After all, when Sirius had been working through the girls at Hogwarts, he would break up with them and move onto the next girl by slowly beginning to miss dates, by becoming unaffectionate, by having sudden violent temperamental moments, where he refused to let anyone but James near him. Whenever he apologised though, I always questioned the truthfulness of the statement, probing at it and always finding a hint of smugness in his tone. Picking up on things that were only in my mind.

But one night, he missed the full moon again, and I heard the following day that there had been a Death Eater attack. All the members of the Order who had been there had been killed or injured. Besides Sirius.

By then, the chasm between us was big enough to engulf all of the Wizarding world, and then some. The attack only seemed to confirm my suspicions about Sirius, and when I looked over at him, sitting beside Marlene McKinnon's bed as she lay dying I knew that something had changed between us. And that nothing would ever be the same again.

*

All the times that we'd had together disappeared that night, fading into distant memories. I knew that he suspected me, and so did James to some degree. We were, as Dumbledore had once prophesised when the Order of the Phoenix had first been formed, being split from the inside out by Voldemort. That's not to say Sirius and I didn't try to fight these cold, calculating feelings that were growing between us and consuming our love for one another. We tried. We tried so hard, with the romantic dinners, the long walks, the passionate talks of "after the war."

But that was the era we were living in - a time of war. Romance had to be put on hold, and Sirius and I had gotten past the "wartime animal shagging," as he put it by then. Not that we didn't occasionally tear into each other and spend the whole night giving in to one another, especially when it was close to the full moon. It was just that our passion couldn't just be encompassed by the physical act of making love.

Sounds cheesy doesn't it? As if we were a fairy tale couple, who were so in love that we were beyond love. But I wonder...if we were really that much in love with each other, if we knew each other as well as we claimed to have, would I ever have believed that he was the traitor in our midst? Would he have ever doubted my loyalty to the Order?

It's pointless asking all these theoretical "what if" questions though. For all of his faults, Sirius was a man of action, never one to just sit around and think things out, at least not too deeply. Which was why we suited one another so well. While he raced into things, I always cautioned him, gently pulling him away from the precipice that he walked upon, and he taught me to live in the moment. To never look back and regret.

I hardly need to say that I haven't been all that true to those things lately. All I've done is sit in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place and wonder what went wrong, wonder where all the magic between Sirius and me faded. I see all the time, in Harry's green eyes, the angry glares, and the pained expressions he thinks no one sees and I know why. He wants to know how I can be so emotionless over the death of Sirius. And although I truly would move mountains for him, I can't tell him I was so in love with his godfather, that we used to have sex that was so passionate it literally heated a room, which makes me want to just shut down and not think about anything. Because if I do start to really poke at what I feel about Sirius being dead, I think I'd just stop. Stop thinking, stop reacting, stop being.

Sure, like most lovers and sweethearts, Sirius and I promised one another long ago that if ever one of us died, we wouldn't be unhappy about it. And when Sirius was put into Azkaban, when I betrayed him by letting the Ministry put him into Azkaban, I wasn't upset. I wasn't torn apart or utterly devastated that Sirius was being sentenced to a place that was even more terrible than death. But now?

I am torn. I am devastated. I can hardly stand being in his childhood home, which he never called a home. Because when he was freed, when we realised what we had done to one another...our magic love came back to life, and Grimmauld Place, although filled with his childhood memories, also came to be filled with our love. Oh, it took time - one year - for both of us to finally come to our senses. But we did, and we managed to hide it so that no one, not even the house elf Kreacher ever discovered our secret.

Only two other people discovered the truth about Sirius and me, and that was James and Lily. They swore they would never tell anyone...and they didn't. It wasn't that our love was shameful, but that, I think, we believed that our love was so special that we didn't want to share it with anyone else.

*

I can't change what happened. I can't turn back time and make my last words to Sirius be "I love you." I can't make it so that he doesn't die.

So I do the only thing I can do right now. I fight. I fight Voldemort, Wormtail, destruction, and grief...

All for the love of Sirius.