The Summer of the Phoenix

Chapter 15

Sirius had gone to bed late that night, still aglow with the fire that the many friendly faces and friendly words had lit within him, the phoenix song still echoing in every fibre of his heart. He had been drunk with joy and friendship and the hope that from now on, things would be starting to change.

Waking up to the gloomy reality of the dusty study the next day was extremely sobering. His first thought, as he blinked into the bright sunlight outside the window, was that he was still stuck in this house, no matter whether two people knew the truth or two dozen, and that all their smiles and all their sympathy wouldn't make him a free man.

The house was very quiet. He had slept almost until noon, and Lupin, who must have been up and about earlier in the morning, had already withdrawn to his room and locked and bolted the door. There was nothing to be done for him now until the moon began to wane again. Until then, Sirius would be alone.

He made some late breakfast in the kitchen. There was a copy of today's Daily Prophet on the table. Sirius flicked through it as he drank his tea. It was full of meaningless nonsense, but there was also a small item in the bottom left corner of page 8, entitled Wizengamot Reform Under Way. It mentioned that Albus Dumbledore had 'stepped aside from his position as Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot in a gesture of encouragement to the necessary and over-due reforms of this venerable institution'. Sirius snorted in disgust and threw the paper into the fire.

A moment later, as he watched it curl into ashes, he regretted it - after all, he had nothing to do, and something to read wouldn't have come amiss. He went back upstairs to take a look at his father's books in the study. A cloud of dust rose from each one he opened. Some of the pages almost crumbled in his hand. Others looked as if they had had their corners chewed off. Some of the books wouldn't open at all, but Sirius didn't bother to find out why. Most of the volumes didn't sound very interesting at any rate. There was a lot of wizarding history and genealogy, much of it in Latin and French, and also quite a few books that Sirius was sure were not sold at Flourish and Blotts, not even under the counter. He finally settled on the sofa with a stack of dusty copies of Transfiguration Today from the 1970es, and started to flick through the January 1974 issue.

January 1974 - he had still been at school then, getting bored in Minerva McGonagall's Transfiguration classes because they didn't progress quickly enough for his taste, and always getting twice as much homework as the rest of the class. He had always complained about that - quite pointlessly, really, since it had usually taken him only half the time the others had needed to complete theirs. Looking back, he realised he should have thanked Professor McGonagall for giving him the chance to delve so deeply into something he was really interested in, instead of letting him waste his time twiddling his thumbs in class and thinking up new mischief.

Switching Spells Revisited - a Critical Assessment of Switching Techniques for Inanimate Objects, the title of the first article read. It was over ten pages long, with lots of complex drawings and diagrams. Switching spells had come up in his OWL exam, Sirius remembered. They had been the ones on animate objects, which were more difficult. He remembered how he had, just for fun, switched a hamster in its cage and a large goldfish in its glass, standing several feet apart on different examiners' desks, instead of the simple, boring intra-species switch between the brown and the white hamster in front of him they had asked him to do. He grinned at the memory of his examiner's astonished face as the hamster threatened to drown in the glass and the goldfish wriggled helplessly at the bottom of the cage.

It felt like it had happened aeons ago in some distant universe.

Sirius turned to the next article, which was entitled Genes or Genius: Can you learn to be a Metamorphmagus?, but he wasn't sure he wanted to read anything about Metamorphmagi right now, or even be reminded of the fact that they existed. Sirius threw down the magazine and went to spend the rest of the day in Buckbeak's company, looking out of the window onto the empty square below until darkness descended on it and a huge full moon rose over the withered trees, bathing Grimmauld Place in an eerie white light.

* * *

It was late on Sunday afternoon when the doorbell rang again, its shrill clanking shattering the complete silence of the house with such force that Sirius, once more absorbed in an old issue of Transfiguration Today (he had progressed as far as October 1976 by then), jumped when it went off. Inevitably, it roused not only him, but also his mother in her portrait downstairs, who promptly added her screams to the ringing of the bells.

Tonks must have been in a hurry to get back to Grimmauld Place, Sirius thought as he made his way downstairs three steps at a time to close the curtains over the screaming portrait and, slightly out of breath, opened the door to - not his cousin, but Mrs Weasley and her son Bill. They both smiled at his surprised expression.

"Hello," Bill greeted him when Sirius made no move to say anything. "We're from Meals on Brooms, your friendly Sunday dinner service. But we see you were obviously expecting someone else."

"I just thought I'd be along with some more shopping," Mrs Weasley explained.

"And I just came along to help with the bags," said Bill, presenting the paper bags he was carrying, "before I'm off to Surrey."

For a moment, Sirius had a fleeting vision of Mad-Eye Moody standing on the doorstep with his shopping bags, and imagined how much more absurd the old Auror would have sounded saying "we're your friendly Sunday dinner service" instead of "you're dead". Bill Weasley seemed so much more comfortable with this kind of task.

"That's really nice of you," Sirius finally said, remembering his manners and stepping aside to let the visitors in. "But - " He had been on the verge of saying that he didn't really need anything, when it finally registered with him that stocking up on the provisions in Grimmauld Place had probably very little to do with the real reason for Mrs Weasley's and her son's visit. "Oh right," he stammered. "You're welcome to stay for dinner, if you like... that is, if you're not wanted at home, Mrs Weasley..."

Bill gave him a grin that quite plainly said something like "ah, he's got it".

"I told you it's Molly," Mrs Weasley reminded Sirius kindly. "And no, I'm rather glad to be out of the way for the moment. Fred and George are taking their Apparation Tests tomorrow, they'll be Apparating all over the house tonight for some last minute practice. And Arthur is there to look after the children anyway." But she didn't seem too convinced that her husband would fulfil this task to her complete satisfaction.

"So who were you expecting?" Bill cut in.

"Tonks," said Sirius curtly, leading the way downstairs to the kitchen.

"Oh, I see," Bill said quite pointedly. "If you'd rather want us to leave..."

"No, I don't." Sirius meant it - he'd spent much of the day wondering whether it had been a good idea to invite Tonks at all, and had only just, on his way to the door, come to the conclusion that it hadn't. He felt a sudden surge of thankfulness towards the Weasleys. They had come to keep him company, but they'd be doing much more than that tonight. The more they were at the dinner table, the easier it would be.

"Look, Tonks is my cousin," he said to the still grinning Bill, and the grin finally disappeared.

As they entered the kitchen, Sirius was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that neither he nor Kreacher had lifted a finger to tidy up the place since Friday night. The used dishes from several meals had joined Lupin's dirty potion pots in the sink, and there were empty bottles of butterbeer on the table. But Mrs Weasley generously overlooked the mess and busied herself instead with unpacking her shopping, pointing her wand here and there to put the kettle on the stove and make the dishes wash themselves in the sink.

"I could get Kreacher to help you with that," Sirius offered apologetically. "It's a job for a house-elf, really, and he hasn't done much all week."

"That's all right," said Mrs Weasley lightly. "I'm used to managing without a house-elf, Sirius, it's not a problem at all." She sat down and started peeling the potatoes, which jumped out of their skins at a flick of her wand.

Sirius watched in fascination, and picked up a potato to try his luck. "So, how's your work at Gringotts, Bill?" he asked, joining Mrs Weasley at the table.

"Oh, quite OK. Better actually than I thought a desk job would be. It might look like a bad move, careers wise," said Bill, looking at his mother as if he was waiting for the next instalment of an already much repeated argument. "But then, being in the Head Office here in London comes with some interesting opportunities. They might send me to their Paris branch for a while if I do well here, for example. Not as long as I'm needed in the Order, of course," he hastened to add as his mother's frown deepened. "That's what I came here for, really."

Mrs Weasley didn't reply, but she made the potatoes jump out of their skins with a force that made it clear that they weren't going anywhere except in the pot, and least of all to Paris. "Oh, give them here," she said absent-mindedly, reaching for the potatoes that Sirius had tried to peel magically while Bill talked. All he had managed to do was give them some ugly hacks and cuts.

"That's better than I could do without magic," he defended himself, and looked around for something else to do, to get rid of the feeling that he was sitting there uselessly while Mrs Weasley was taking care of the whole house and everyone in it. And as if in answer to his secret wish, the doorbell rang again.

"I'll go," he said quickly, and hurried upstairs.