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remix_reduxTitle: The Red and the Black (The Neverland Remix)
Author:![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
daphnaea
Summary: Sirius is reading The Communist Manifesto. Somehow, Remus knows, this will end in disaster.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Sirius Black, Remus Lupin
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Original Story: “Marked” by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elucreh
Notes: Many thanks to my beta,such_heights, without whom I would have torn much more of my hair out, for pointing out mistakes and also telling me that I could do this.
Part 1
“Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.”
It was Sunday afternoon. Remus was in the library, James off with Lily the Traitor. Sirius was sitting cross-legged on his bed (which he’d warded against sparks) practicing miniature magical fireworks. Hippogriff in flight. Veela, winking seductively. Flock of Snidgets.
Peter laughed at something in the letter he was reading at his desk.
Sirius’s Mooncalf fizzled prematurely. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Oh, just my mum. She’s fixing up my room for when I move back in summer. Wants to know if the rug should be Aubergine or Blushing Banshee. ‘Sif I know the difference.”
Sirius shifted forward onto his elbows. “Say, Pete. About the summer. I was wondering if you were really sure about this going home business. I mean, it’s not exactly Communist, is it, exploiting all those bees. Prostituting the fruits of your labour on the open market. I thought maybe we could sort something out together, keep the Party going.”
Peter bristled. “We don’t exploit the bees, Padfoot. We take very good care of them. And there is nothing immoral about my family business.”
“Well, of course not, not per se. But honestly, you don’t even like Care of Magical Creatures. You’re just in it for the easy N.E.W.T.”
“Well, it never covered bees, did it? And I’ll have you know that I have some really good ideas for this new line of novelty candles–”
“Yeah, a proper bourgeois entrepreneur, aren’t you?” Sirius said snottily.
Peter frowned, not his usual scowl of eager concentration but something much colder. “Just because you don’t give a Shrivelfig for your family, it doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t care about ours. My da’s health’s not so good, and my mum can’t run the place on her own. Some of us actually take it seriously when the people we love need us. It’s this Gryffindor thing you might have heard of – loyalty.”
Sirius jerked back as if he’d been hexed. “Yes, but loyalty to what? What about our Comrades? What about our ideals? What about our sodding responsibility to do something good? To fix everything that’s going wrong?”
“Yeah, Sirius. Taking sweets from first-years is just going to save the bloody world, is it? I’m sure You-Know-Who’s just quaking with fear.”
Sirius stared at him. “But – that’s not what we’re doing. It’s –”
“Isn’t it?” Peter asked, and stood up. “Look, I’m going to find Remus. We’re meant to do Ancient Runes together. Try not to set the dorm on fire.”
“Capitalist rat,” Sirius muttered. In the sudden quiet of Peter’s absence, the accusations lingered. Was that really what they thought? Surely not. Pete was just being sour. He was, Sirius knew, at least as bitter about the whole Lily thing as he was – Wormtail just bothered hiding it, because heaven forbid James think badly of him.
But just in case, something ought to be done. There was a point to prove. It was time for Phase Two.
“Eventually Peter would dive through the air, and catch Michael just before he could strike the sea, and it was lovely the way he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life. Also he was fond of variety, and the sport that engrossed him one moment would suddenly cease to engage him, so there was always the possibility that the next time you fell he would let you go.”
Remus always sat in the same squashy armchair during Party meetings, far enough back to be unobtrusive but far enough forward not to seem as if he was avoiding his friends. The meeting began with the standard ritual of collection and allotment, which had become routine despite Sirius’s theatrics. Once they’d received their chocolate, the second-years snuck out the back, too young to be interested in ideology and too old to be intimidated into dutiful attendance. Remus made a mental outline for his Potions essay as he gazed blankly at the front of the room, at least until his brain alerted him that something new was afoot.
“…and that is why,” Sirius was saying, looming over the crowd in his menacingly furry hat, “the time has come to take our revolution beyond the bounds of the tower. We cannot rest while our brother proletarians in Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw groan and suffer beneath the grinding wheels of capitalism. It is time for the students of Hogwarts to rise together as one to throw off the chains of the bourgeoisie! It is our duty and joyful obligation to lift them up into the light of Communism and unity! We will no longer bear the brutal yoke of marks and exams, as if that was the measure of our worth! We must each be recognised for what we as individuals have to contribute to our happy cooperative! Let those of us who thrive on chopping and stirring be given free use of Slughorn’s cupboards! Let those of us whose talent at Defence can safeguard us all be let into the Restricted Section! Each of us has different strengths, but the Educational-Industrial Complex wants to make each of us the same, interchangeable, to wear us down until we are mere exam-taking, wand-waving automatons! I say we tear down the stone walls of this prison, the barriers between one House and the next, between Herbologist and Astronomer, I say we show our bearded, wrinkled oppressors what we can truly accomplish when we work together with the spirit of brotherhood and revolution in our breasts! What do you say, my Comrades?”
The crowd clapped uncertainly. One third-year raised his hand.
“Yes, Comrade Paul?” Sirius asked.
Paul stood up anxiously. “Er, you know that bit about tearing down the walls? Was that figurative? Because it’s a bit cold at this time of the year for sleeping outside.”
Sirius denied that any actual demolition would take place, and the other Gryffindors relaxed somewhat. After that, a motion to proceed with the liberation of the other Houses was raised and passed, and Sirius assigned tasks – developing slogans, writing pamphlets, researching useful Charms, and so on.
Remus felt a headache coming on. No good could come of this. And they’d done so well that year at not losing House points by the bushel-full, what with James’s newly developed sense of responsibility and Sirius’s sulking. No one’d had the focus to well and truly sabotage any chance Gryffindor might have of ever winning the House Cup with the four of them within its walls. But all that was clearly about to change.
“The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.”
Sirius thought that the pamphlet and banner campaign was going splendidly. Not that there had been any actual recruits yet from the other Houses, of course, but there were signs everywhere of consciousness being raised to new levels. The Ravenclaws had attempted a counter-pamphleting initiative detailing the mechanics of free market economics, but this had come to little due to intra-House conflict between the Keynesians and the monetarists, as well as the fact that their shortest pamphlet was over three feet long and no one in any other House had actually gotten through one. The Hufflepuffs had taken to casting Temporary Sticking Charms on all of their possessions whenever they left their dormitories, in case of hand-to-hand abolition of private property. The Slytherins discussed their families’ wealth and influence at every opportunity, and had not yet caught on to the fact that the Gryffindors were not actually insulted when they said things like “Communism is for plebes.”
The library sit-in for Restricted Section privileges had been hastily aborted after a number of Slytherins had joined, as it was obvious to any thinking person that the Slytherins were a pack of capitalist Bundimuns who lacked all sympathy for the working classes.
Gryffindor lost House points at the rate of one per pamphlet and five per banner. McGonagall’s lips had narrowed so much as to be in danger of disappearing permanently, but Sirius was rather looking forward to finding out what would happen once Gryffindor got into negative points. He was taken aback to realize that this was something he and James had not yet achieved, and was glad steps were being taken to address this oversight before they left school. Some of his comrades showed signs of flagging spirits, but he’d addressed this though a letter-writing campaign to the Gryffindor parents, which resulted in dramatically increased chocolate reserves and a corresponding upswing in morale. He also gave a special address called “House Points are for Capitalists,” in which he explained that the bourgeois values of mindless acquisition must be rejected in order for the revolution to succeed. When this did not have the desired effect, he instituted a new intra-House system of Communist Credits, in which points could be earned by contributions of money, chocolate, special services to the Party, or Outstanding-grade notes, as well as by publicly Charming Slytherins or their possessions red. Sirius himself led scoring in the final category, though only because James held Lily the Traitor’s good graces in higher regard than brotherhood and the cause of justice.
Things were going really well, Sirius told himself as he ran down the corridor away from the dungeons, where he’d just given a roomful of Slytherins blood red wand-and-sickle emblems on their foreheads. The poor bastards were still trying to Finite Incantem each other, as if his spells hadn’t been beyond that since fourth year.
It was almost like old times, really. Except that there was no one running with him. No Prongs giving their location away with his ungodly cackling, no Pete glancing worriedly behind him, no Moony swearing in a continuous low monotone. Poor tossers are missing out on all the fun, he thought.
When he got back to the Gryffindor common room, panting as the Fat Lady swung shut behind him, Remus glanced up briefly and then returned his attention to the game of chess he was playing with Peter. James flailed an arm at him from behind Lily the Traitor, in what could have been either a greeting or a symptom of oxygen deprivation. Not even the second-years swapping chocolate frog cards by the fireplace seemed interested in his new and obviously extremely daring and brilliant adventure. Revolutionary leaders just didn’t get any respect any more.
Sirius stomped up to the dormitory without even bothering to award himself Communist Credits for his exploits, attended by only another unreadable flicker of Moony’s gaze.
“Peter spoke indignantly. ‘You don't think I would kill him while he was sleeping! I would wake him first, and then kill him. That's the way I always do.’”
Sirius was, Remus felt, a textbook example of many things, not least of which was what happened to children who could only attract their parents’ notice by misbehaving. Mildly sadistic pranks. Long hair. Inappropriate liaisons. Political revolution. Remus imagined there probably were limits to what his friend would do to draw attention, but he’d not yet seen any hint of them. It was possible that he’d been Sorted into Gryffindor instead of Slytherin on basis of this trait alone – the concept of getting away with things was not only foreign but actually repugnant to him. What was the point of causing trouble if no one knew who’d done it? Why humiliate someone anonymously when you could sign your name on his face? Every piece of Communist propaganda in Hogwarts was decked out in unmistakable Gryffindor red. If it’d been Slytherins plotting revolution, they’d have blamed it on the Hufflepuffs.
Occasionally, in his least generous moments, Remus had suspected Sirius of becoming an Animagus primarily so that Remus could never stop needing him. Sirius’s affection was both more selfish and more selfless than that of anyone else Remus knew. He gave everything and demanded everything. He had no boundaries. Those he loved became part of him, cared for and defended as fiercely as his own limbs but also controlled, pushed, taken for granted. And now his best friends, his extra arms, were detaching from him. James was preoccupied, Pete had always resented Sirius’s closeness with Prongs, and Remus – well. He was still there. Just, perhaps, not quite as there as he’d once been.
At Party meetings, Remus sometimes wondered if he was watching a Communist takeover or a very slow, very public mental breakdown. As Padfoot’s rhetorical excesses climbed to new heights of doublethink and hyperbole, the anger and desperation in his fur-topped face became more and more visible, at least to someone who really knew him, at least to someone who understood that the things he wanted his friends to share could never be collected up and divvied out from the common room tables.
The next night, Sirius jinxed a second-year girl for sneaking a treacle tart up from the kitchens for her personal consumption, and Remus realized that something had to be done. He’d get Prongs to talk to Sirius. Prongs was the one he was really showing off for, in that awful, obvious way of his. And if James didn’t start paying attention… Remus really didn’t want to be there when Padfoot reinvented the gulag.
“Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.”
The formation of the Central Committee, Sirius thought happily, was the best idea yet. James had been right – it was too much work just for him, and with more people in charge, a great deal more could be accomplished. Besides which, it was much more fun to plot the overthrow of the school with his friends. Or with James and, well, other people. Peter obviously hadn’t the dedication for it, and Remus had declined a position on the Committee with a faint smile and a murmur of, “I prefer to be the invisible power behind the throne, thanks.” And he’d been unable to think of an excuse to exclude Marlene, what with her intense enthusiasm and, well, the glaring. Frank and Vanshi were the token sixth-years, and Phoebe was let on for decorative purposes. Together, they formed the Central Leadership Committee of the Gryffindor People’s Glorious Democratic Communistic Front, a name that was itself designed by the Committee. The CLCGPGDCF was in charge of the collection and distribution of goods, the coordination of the propaganda drive, and the settling of disputes between Comrades and accusations of capitalism or treason.
With so many people working to perfect the Communist system, Sirius was sure that some breakthrough was at hand. Soon it would all start running properly. The details would finally be worked out and there would be no more private chocolate caches to discover, no more flagging attendance at meetings, no more absurd arguments about whether Amanda or Cynthia had greater need of Amanda’s pink dragonhide boots for the upcoming Hogsmeade weekend. Surely the last few kinks were already being worked out, and soon there would be harmony and brotherhood and everyone would realize how much better off they were as Communists, and next year when he was gone and Frank had taken over, maybe they’d decide to put up a statue of him in remembrance of his dedication to the public good. Sirius thought it might look nice over by the fireplace.
“Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change.”
For three days, Sirius walked like a hero, a prophet among his chosen people. His grin poured benevolent pride across the common room. Remus sat back in his armchair of choice and indulged in some private smugness at the success of his intervention. He’d done well. He’d appealed to James’s sense of self-importance, both as Sirius’s best mate and as Head Boy, and persuaded him to step in while disaster could still be averted. And Sirius had a whole committee to boss around and James spent less time in storage cupboards and no one had been hexed in three days.
But, because he was Remus, it was obvious that such luck couldn’t last. Things began to go wrong on Friday, when Sirius came bounding into the dormitory where Remus was attempting to study for an Arithmancy quiz.
“Prongs! Why aren’t you at the Committee meeting? It’s already started.”
James finished shrugging on his Quidditch robes. “’S nothing important today, is it? I promised King I’d help him work on his Double Eight Loops.”
“Nothing important?” Sirius demanded. “We have to approve the new banner slogans! And finalize the acquisitions budget for Hogsmeade tomorrow! You know how divided the Committee is on the Sneakoscope issue! I need you!”
James waved an imperious hand. “I hereby authorize you to vote on my behalf. Now if that’s sorted, I need to get down to the pitch.”
“No it is not bloody sorted, Prongs. You have a responsibility here, why don’t you just tell King you’ll help him play with his balls tomorrow?”
“You know I’m going to Hogsmeade with Lily tomorrow, but yes, you’re right. I do have a responsibility. Because I’m the captain of the team, and the Ravenclaw game is coming up, and while you may have forgotten how this works, I am not going to have a clumsy Keeper just because my ex-Beater wants to make a shopping list.”
Remus winced. The reference to Sirius’s permanent expulsion from the team was a dirty play. It was high on their list of forbidden topics, because it was a consequence of that night last year, and Sirius was therefore not allowed to blame it on anyone else (not even Snape), and it was too large a thing to talk about without jokes and righteous indignation.
“Fuck you, too,” Sirius said, and swept out.
James laughed ruefully and glanced at Remus, briefly catching his gaze.
Remus looked away.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever fully understand the dynamics of his dormitory, which seemed at once inexplicable and inevitable. What else could be expected, if one combined four mismatched boys in a single room under a low flame for seven years, stirring in one wolf bite, one invisibility cloak, one Ancient and Most Noble House, simmering until precipitate emerged in the form one dog, one stag, and one rat, adding a bucket of hormones and a pinch of betrayal, a Golden Snitch, a magical map, a whiff of jealousy, a Head Boy’s badge, a suggestion of the future… In other dorms, the students seemed to pair off or form groups more casually, without these tidal pulls of jealous resentment and possessive loyalty. Remus wondered what it would be like, sometimes, to have friends he could escape from, who did not expect him to belong to them, first and always. He wondered, but not too hard, because he did have other friends, like Alice, like David from Ravenclaw, and he liked them, and studied with them, and chatted in the halls, and they didn’t know his secrets, and they didn’t feel quite like real friends at all.
From the outside, he imagined the four of them must look like an unchanging unit, a perpetual quadrangle of shoulders crowded together over a library table or dormitory bed, but from within it wasn’t constant at all. Internal bonds waxed and waned with pranks and spats and Quidditch games, James and Sirius usually tightest but not always, not when only Pete would listen to Prongs moaning about Lily, or when Pads went through his Muggle literature phase. There was the friend you talked to about ice cream flavours and the friend you talked to about combining a Shrinking spell with a Hover Charm and the friend you talked to when your parents might not like you any more. And when you all lived in the same room, it was impossible not to know who was, at any given time, slighting who for whom.
James didn’t come to the Party meeting at all that night, and Maggie got caught with money in her toad bank, and after Sirius was done with her she had to go to the Hospital Wing.
The following evening, half a dozen Sneakoscopes were positioned throughout the common room. No one would sit near them.
Remus cast petrifying spells on each one after Sirius went to sleep.
“In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
“Lils needs her Ancient Runes notes back from Marlene,” James said as soon as he sat down at the table. It was lunchtime, and Remus and Peter hadn’t gotten back from Herbology yet.
Sirius glowered at his bastard of an adopted brother, who was guzzling pumpkin juice as if he didn’t owe him about five different apologies. “So? How is this my problem?”
James grabbed the Cornish pasties and helped himself to several of them. “You’re the grand high leader thing. Marlene has some Communist theory about why she should keep the notes. Tell her she’s wrong. Make her give them back.”
It was at the word thing that Sirius’s expression splintered and reformed into a sneering mask he’d cribbed from his mother. “And exactly why would I want to do that, James?” he asked.
James gave him a questioning look. “Well, because they’re her notes,” he said as if explaining something to a particularly dim Hufflepuff. “And she has a project due.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” Sirius said. “Those are the Party’s notes, which Evans contributed to the cause as per the dictates of the Gryffindor Communist Charter of Rights and Obligations, paragraph seven. Marlene has a project due for the class as well, and as her current average is lower than Lily’s, I’m afraid we must conclude that her need for the notes is greater. However, I’m sure Evans will find a selection of perfectly adequate substitutes if she checks the Circular File of Communal Knowledge in the common room.”
James was turning an interesting shade of red. “That is not on,” he growled. “Those are Lily’s notes. My girlfriend is not going to fail her project because of your stupid revolution.”
“Evans is very clever,” he agreed. “I’m sure she’ll find a way to make do.”
Remus and Peter arrived then, dropping their book bags onto the floor noisily and climbing into their seats. “What’s Lily going to do?” Remus asked.
“He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding; and the elegance of his diction, even when he was swearing, no less than the distinction of his demeanour, showed him one of a different cast from his crew.”
“What’s Lily going to do?” Remus asked as he sat down, glancing quickly between his two friends. It was obvious from Sirius’s face that something was very wrong – when angry, he exploded rather messily, but when hurt he folded down into an aristocratic icicle – and it was obvious from James’s tomato-red complexion that he didn’t particularly care. It normally took quite a bit to hurt Padfoot’s feelings, as he tended to operate under the premise that if something sounded uncomplimentary, he must have heard it wrong, but James had been wearing him down for some time.
“Fail her Runes project, because Pratfoot here won’t get her notes back from McKinnon,” James spat.
“I feel I ought to point out that this whole conversation is rather irregular,” Sirius said mildly. “Complaints about the distribution of commonly held goods are to be brought before the Commissioner for Justice, who will in turn report any legitimate concerns to the full Committee.”
“But Marlene is the Commissioner for Justice.”
Sirius raised an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting that Commissioner McKinnon would allow personal considerations to outweigh her devotion to the public good?”
James boggled at him. “Are you suggesting that she wouldn’t?”
Sirius tsked gently. “Disregarding established procedure, accusing a Commissioner of corruption… It doesn’t speak well of you, Potter. This behaviour may have to be brought up before the Committee. I wouldn’t be surprised if you and Evans were denied access to the Circular File entirely.”
Remus winced. James slammed his fist down onto the table, spilling pumpkin juice onto himself. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “You’ve finally gone barking mad. This is not some game any more, Pads. Our N.E.W.T.s are coming up, and if you think the Head Boy and Girl are going to fail them because you’re in some kind of political snit, then you and I and Professor McGonagall are going to be having a little chat.”
“I assure you, the only one of us who regards this as a game is you, and you would be wise to reconsider.”
Remus thought that someone ought to storm off at that point, but no one did. Sirius continued reducing his food to small, perfect cubes, and James continued to attack his pasties as if they contained Padfoot’s face.
“If it’s just the notes,” Pete ventured after a minute of horrible silence, “why not use a Duplicating Charm on them?”
James and Sirius both glared at him.
“Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.”
Sirius sat on the floor of the common room, back against the wall, moodily conjuring glass balls and then imploding them, hating everything indiscriminately. James for being an utter arse and Remus for not doing anything about it, Pete for his stupid voice and Lily for her stupid notes, Marlene for her bossy face and Karl Marx for his wretched books that didn’t fix anything, and himself, for being able to get things right any time but when it mattered. Because he could conjure a hovering bauble like the ones the house elves used to hang on the Christmas tree and shatter it inside a shield spell without saying a word, but he didn’t know how to make James the bloody bastard talk to him for five minutes about anything other than Lily or Quidditch or his stupid Head Berk duties or any of the other thousand things apparently more important than Sirius. He didn’t know if he’d failed somehow, failed to turn into the person James wanted him to be, or if James just didn’t need a pretend brother at all any more. He wished, abruptly, that he’d never had his friends, that he’d been sorted properly into Slytherin and spent the last seven years hexing his dormmates and never known what it was like to have anyone want him for nothing more or less than himself.
Oh, Sirius had always known how to make himself wanted, how to make his opinion seem important, his smiles a valuable commodity. He knew how to make a girl blush and a boy slap him on the back, and how to make anyone at all laugh. But to be wanted without those things – that had been an act of inexplicable grace. And now it seemed to be over, and he couldn’t even be properly furious about it, because he knew he’d never deserved it to begin with. Things were coming – war and N.E.W.T.s and the time in life when you have to cook your own supper – and he didn’t know how to make himself fit into those pictures. He felt like a discarded toy, and he wanted to jump up and down and scream, I’m here, but that would be a sure sign he’d lost the plot, and he was hoping to hold onto sanity a bit longer than some of his relatives.
“Oh, there you are!” Phoebe said, dropping gracefully down onto the floor beside him. “What’re you doing?”
He shrugged. “Exploding things.”
She giggled as if this was clever. He glanced up at her. She was giving him the look and edging closer. Phoebe wasn’t exactly discriminating, but she was the prettiest girl in the tower.
He conjured a red glass flower and handed it to her.
She giggled again. “How’d you do that?”
He leaned into her hair and whispered, “Magic.”
“You’re rather good at it.”
“I’m rather good at a lot of things.”
“Anything else you could show me?”
He ran a finger up her arm. “Not here.”
Her lips quirked. “I hear the broom cupboards are lovely at this time of year.”
He rose, and offered her a hand up. She took it, pulled him into her, and murmured, “Charms corridor, ten minutes. Bring your hat.” Then she winked and swept off in a flurry of skirts and too-sweet floral perfume.
Sirius leaned back against the wall and smirked. Maybe he was losing his friends, but there was still his hat, and the prospect of Phoebe spread over an unused desk, and a whole bloody revolutionary movement. He would make the best of what he had.
“The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had had their dinners.”
There was no one, Remus knew, who believed in performative language like a wizard. For this was what human magic came to: the power of words to alter the world. Anyone could use language to describe things. But when a wizard spoke the right words in the right way, tortoises became teapots and nothing became something. People died from words and were healed by them. And it was difficult, sometimes, to keep in mind that not all things could be made true just by saying them. And it was especially difficult, he thought, for Sirius, whose boundary between should be and is had always been a bit murky. Sirius believed in things in a way that not even other wizards did. He believed that a werewolf could be trusted with his life. He believed that three twelve-year-olds could become Animagi. He believed that friendship could be transmuted into brotherhood by a throwaway oath in a hidden passageway. He believed that snowball fights could vanquish his enemies and a pirate hat could strike awe into any heart, as long as it had a long enough plume. He believed that love poets were really in love, and that there were no limits to what one could do to protect a friend or correct an injustice. He believed that when the residents of Gryffindor tower pledged their chocolate to the Communist cause, it meant that a revolution had occurred.
Just now, it seemed he believed that if he drowned himself in firewhiskey, then everything would be all right. He was sitting on the floor in a darkened corner of Honeydukes’ cellar, bottle cradled against his chest, head tilted back against the wall. There was a method to the pattern of places Sirius chose to hide out in, involving variables ranging from his mood to the weather, and it made Remus want to draw charts. The Honeydukes’ cellar came into play when he wanted somewhere comforting (the smell of sweets), warm (less than usually Byronic), and remote enough that anyone trying to find him would have to make a real effort to do so.
Sirius didn’t react when Remus emerged from the passageway. When he sat down beside him, Sirius held out the bottle without opening his eyes. They passed it back and forth slowly, the heat and alcohol eating away at Remus’s tension until he slouched bonelessly against the wall, the headache that had clasped a tight band around his temples relaxing for the first time that day. It was peaceful, the smell of cocoa and butterscotch evoking childhood, and safety, and Remus decided that he was hiding out, too.
Eventually Sirius shifted, sliding a bit further down the wall, and his knee bent out, coming to rest against Remus’s calf. It was bony and a little heavy, but Remus didn’t move away. There’d been something he meant to say to Sirius, sometime, but he couldn’t think of it. It didn’t really matter. He couldn’t say that James was just going through a phase, or that things would go back to normal, or that they would be all right. Maybe it was better to merely sit there, in the dark, touching just enough to prove they weren’t alone, and let Sirius go on believing whatever it was that he still could.
“Just as to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.”
It was Phoebe’s idea, another plot to recruit the other Houses, but Sirius was willing to take credit for the party nonetheless. It was called the Bloc Party and a huge red flag obscured the entire wall opposite the common room door, and every guest upon arrival was issued a fur hat (none quite so impressive as his, of course) and a wand and sickle armband. The slogan “Communism means our firewhiskey is your firewhiskey” seemed to be going down a lot better than “you have nothing to lose but your chains” had, and seemingly every Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw in fourth year and above was partaking freely. Pete had been put in charge of music, and the Charmed record player was currently blaring out “We don’t need no ed-u-ca-tion! We don’t need no thought con-trol!” so loudly that the furniture seemed to be vibrating. Pete himself, hat abandoned and House tie knotted around his head, was attempting to sway against Cassandra. Sirius thought that someone probably ought to stop him, for his own good.
The room revolved pleasantly, and Sirius was sweating with intoxication and the heat of too many bodies pressed against his own. He pushed his way over to the corner, where Moony stood behind the table they were using as a bar. Once his drink had been topped off, he leaned against the wall and watched Remus chatting with some Ravenclaw drinking (of all things) butterbeer. Everyone had thought that Remus couldn’t dance until they’d been over to his house for New Years and seen him fox-trotting his grandmother about the living room. Then they’d realized he just couldn’t dance with anyone under fifty. He was, however, excellent at pouring drinks. Sirius hadn’t believed they needed a barkeep, originally, but then there had been the incident with the purple stuff stuck to the ceiling, and they’d won him over. Moony said he liked doing it, anyway, and Sirius had been unable to tell if he was being honest or having one of his self-sacrificing moments. Sirius hoped it wasn’t the latter, because in that case he’d have to be pummelled.
It occurred to him that this was the second time he’d gotten pissed that week, but this seemed unproblematic. He knew from his father’s example that he’d be all right until he started drinking scotch before lunch. And in this state he wasn’t fussed about James sneaking upstairs with Lily the Traitor, or about Phoebe throwing herself at some Hufflepuff who was approximately seven feet tall and built like a barn. He wondered if she’d thought up the party just as an excuse to get her kittenish little claws into him, then reminded himself that paranoia was among the family traits he was trying to avoid.
His cup was empty again. He pushed himself off of the wall and the room twirled faster. He tapped Moony for a refill, and his friend gave him a sharp look before complying. He knew he’d be cut off soon, but that was all right. One more ought to be enough. He blinked. Something hurtled into his side. It was a girl. Cynthia. Cynthia had nice… somethings. They all did. He allowed himself to be pulled back toward the dancers. Firewhiskey spilt over his fingers. His Housemates pressed in all around, a mass of bouncing bodies. His Comrades. They were beautiful, really, beautiful and sad and ridiculous and, just then, a bit sticky. He wanted to save them and he wanted them to know it and he wanted them to say, “Thank you, Sirius Black, for saving us. By doing so you have shown your worth and done so well that your entire family has been redeemed, back for the last ten generations.” Except that wasn’t right. Those bastards didn’t have anything to do with him any more. Didn’t bloody want to be redeemed, did they?
Something hurt. Possibly his stomach. Possibly he was hungry. Supper seemed a very long time ago. He downed the rest of his drink instead.
“Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest.”
Of all the terrible things that Sirius believed, by far the worst was that people ought to get what they deserved. This conviction was one of the few legacies of his parents that he’d kept. Where they believed that desserts were determined by class and breeding, he discriminated according to acts and character. But he was equally unforgiving.
Sometimes, Remus looked into his friend’s hard, demanding face and blamed himself. Because Sirius had no idea how to absolve himself for his sins, and of all his sins, the worst was committed against Remus. And Remus, who knew him, who had not forgotten how it all started, had gone back to his dorm, instead of the Hospital Wing, the day that Severus Snape nailed his hand to the table with his Potions knife. They’d been partnered by Slughorn, and his talent for the class, never substantial, had been annihilated by the immanence of the moon. It had ended predictably. Cauldron exploded. Failed assignment, Snape’s first. They’d been kept after to clean up. Remus Scourgified the cauldrons. Snape scraped fragments of liver off the table. Remus didn’t even see it happen, but Snape had only said “Oops,” and it hadn’t sounded like an apology. It had been strange, feeling pain like that while not half out of his mind from transformation. Snape retrieved his knife and walked out of the room, and Remus had sagged against the table and believed for the first time that perhaps the Slytherin did have what it would take to be a Death Eater, after all. He wondered how much that was due to the influence of Snape’s friends, and how much to the influence of his own.
Remus had wrapped his hand in one end of his scarf, picked up his bag, and walked back to the dorm, where Sirius was waiting for him to show up and research spells for a prank. “Snape,” he’d hissed when he saw the wound, dribbling blood onto the floor, and Remus had not denied it. “I’ll kill him,” he’d said, but then he’d cast the healing Charms he’d learnt for moons and dragged him down to see Pomfrey, and Remus had forgotten that it was not a figure of speech. At least until he’d woken up the next morning, and everything had been wrong.
He was certain that Sirius still believed Snape had deserved to be ripped apart by the wolf. It had seemed fitting to him, poetic even. His guilt was purely for the danger he’d put Remus in, and James. His only sin was that of betrayal. But Sirius had read his Dante. He knew where traitors ranked, and if there was no Satan to chew him to pieces, he would take the job on himself. Sirius had never known how to let go.
Just then, he was clinging to his revolution with tooth and nail and an ever-increasing viciousness. At least half the tower had been caught in some sort of infraction by then, and with each punishment, the possibility of mercy dwindled. No one was prepared to let anyone else get away with something he’d suffered for. Amanda and Cynthia weren’t speaking any more. Paul hadn’t been seen in the common room in a week. And still, somehow, Sirius seemed to believe that hexing and humiliating his Housemates was actually going to turn them into good little Communists. Remus felt that said something rather saddening about how he’d been raised.
“Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love.”
“So,” Frank said, after the official Committee Meeting had broken up and it was just the boys left, too lazy to drag themselves out of their armchairs. “You and Phoebe. Or is it you and Cynthia?”
Sirius shrugged, long practiced in burying anything resembling uncertainty well beneath a smooth veneer of arrogant indifference. “Just doing my Communist duty, sharing my assets with all those in need.”
Frank laughed. “We should start lending you out to the other Houses. You’d do wonders for recruitment.”
“Phoebe too,” Sirius said, his grin growing sharper. “She’s very generous that way.”
“Hey, we should all do our parts. I’m up for it. Anything for the cause, right?”
“We should start sign-ups. Divide and conquer. You in, James?”
James picked his head up off the couch. “Yeah, absolutely, as long as you’re the one who explains it to Lily.” He smirked in anticipation.
Sirius raised a contemplative eyebrow. “Lily,” he said. “You’re on to something there. They’d line up down the hall for her. Half of Hogwarts’ll be gagging to go Red.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Marriage is an empty bourgeois institution,” Sirius said glibly. “Its hypocritical pseudo-morals are offensive to any true Communist. The brotherhood of workers shares all.”
James let himself fall back onto the couch in disgust. “You share anything you want, but any bloke besides me who touches her is going to get a nice share of an Entrail-Expelling Curse, and that’s before Lily gets to them.”
Frank sniggered. “So you mean you four don’t share everything?”
James began to look a bit purple. “Lily is not a thing. She is a person. There is no sharing of people.”
“Well that’s a very capitalist way of looking at it,” Frank said rather pompously. “I don’t know if you’ve taken the time to properly read The Manifesto, but it very clearly states-”
“I don’t care if it sings the bloody national anthem. This is my girlfriend we’re talking about.”
Sirius raised an eyebrow. “So you admit that you put her before your commitment to your brother proletarians?”
James’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t do this, Padfoot. Do not try to turn this into some sort of choice.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m just trying to fully understand your position, here.”
“That’s bollocks,” he said bitterly. “We both know exactly what you’re asking, and it’s childish and ridiculous. Lily would never ask me to choose like that.”
“No,” Sirius told him. “But then, she doesn’t have to, does she?”
“Always when he said, ‘Peter Pan has spoken,’ it meant that they must now shut up, and they accepted it humbly in that spirit; but they were by no means so respectful to the other boys, whom they looked upon as just ordinary braves.”
“Why are there firsties on my bed?” Peter asked when he and Remus got back from the library.
Sirius (who’d been banned from doing Ancient Runes assignments with them for insisting on writing his answers in limerick form) smiled fondly at the children gathered on Pete’s bed. “They’re gathering the luminous pearls of my wisdom.”
Remus’s mind went blank with horror. “I don’t care what he said, arson will not get you out of homework assignments, girls’ knickers cannot be used as a form of currency, griffins do not make friendly and affectionate pets, and Unforgivables are illegal even when used on Slytherins.”
The first-years looked like they were getting ideas.
“Oh Moony, it’s nothing like that,” Sirius said, though he looked rather as if he was getting ideas as well. “They’re thinking of forming a taskforce.”
“I see.” Remus perched on the end of his own bed, which itself showed signs of recent unauthorized occupation. “What kind of taskforce?”
“A taskforce on un-Communist activities,” Kingsley answered smartly.
“That’s nice,” Peter said. “Do you think you could have your taskforce on the floor?”
Kingsley gave him a suspicious look, clearly feeling the request bordered on an assertion of private property.
“Come on,” Sirius said. “Let’s head downstairs. I think the taskforce formation would be helped along by a bit of chocolate.”
The children trooped out of the room behind Padfoot. Kingsley was at the rear, and cast a last appraising glance around the dorm before he let the door swing closed.
Pete threw himself down on his now vacant bed. “It was bad enough when Padfoot’s fan club was just those stupid girls.”
Remus smirked. “He always did like getting new toys.”
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.”
“What are you going to do to Alice?” Lily demanded, green eyes narrowed to mossy slits.
Sirius gave her an innocent look. “What’re you on about?”
“Alice. I was there when Kingsley came round doing his ridiculous inspections, and I want to know what you’re going to do to her.”
The way her arms were crossed so tightly across her chest did nice things for her breasts, but he decided not to mention that. “The same thing as would happen to anyone else, of course.”
“Don’t try that with me. We all know perfectly well that your absurd punishments are based on nothing more than how bad your mood is.”
Sirius lounged back as if the armchair were a throne. “Well if that’s the case, I have to say this conversation isn’t doing much to improve my mood, Evans.”
Lily’s lip curled. “Look, Black, you may be the grand high poomba of your delusional little world, but I am still the Head Girl, and if Alice – if anyone – goes to the Hospital Wing, I guarantee that McGonagall will be handing out more than just detentions. So think carefully before the meeting tonight, because after last year I don’t think you need that much more rope to hang yourself with.”
Something unpleasant coiled in Sirius’s stomach. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe I don’t,” she said. “But you do. And whatever your feelings for me, if you take them out on my friend I will see that you regret it.”
“Fine,” he spat. “You have my bloody word. Alice will get no more than James would, in her place.” Lily raised a knowing eyebrow. “Or Pete.” The eyebrow did not descend. “Or Remus.”
Lily nodded briskly and turned away. “I would expect no less of someone so committed to the ideals of brotherhood,” she called over her shoulder, her tone unreadable.
Sirius picked absently at the worn spot in the red upholstery, making it worse.
Part 3
Author:
daphnaeaSummary: Sirius is reading The Communist Manifesto. Somehow, Remus knows, this will end in disaster.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Sirius Black, Remus Lupin
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Original Story: “Marked” by
elucrehNotes: Many thanks to my beta,
such_heights, without whom I would have torn much more of my hair out, for pointing out mistakes and also telling me that I could do this.Part 1
“Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.”
It was Sunday afternoon. Remus was in the library, James off with Lily the Traitor. Sirius was sitting cross-legged on his bed (which he’d warded against sparks) practicing miniature magical fireworks. Hippogriff in flight. Veela, winking seductively. Flock of Snidgets.
Peter laughed at something in the letter he was reading at his desk.
Sirius’s Mooncalf fizzled prematurely. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Oh, just my mum. She’s fixing up my room for when I move back in summer. Wants to know if the rug should be Aubergine or Blushing Banshee. ‘Sif I know the difference.”
Sirius shifted forward onto his elbows. “Say, Pete. About the summer. I was wondering if you were really sure about this going home business. I mean, it’s not exactly Communist, is it, exploiting all those bees. Prostituting the fruits of your labour on the open market. I thought maybe we could sort something out together, keep the Party going.”
Peter bristled. “We don’t exploit the bees, Padfoot. We take very good care of them. And there is nothing immoral about my family business.”
“Well, of course not, not per se. But honestly, you don’t even like Care of Magical Creatures. You’re just in it for the easy N.E.W.T.”
“Well, it never covered bees, did it? And I’ll have you know that I have some really good ideas for this new line of novelty candles–”
“Yeah, a proper bourgeois entrepreneur, aren’t you?” Sirius said snottily.
Peter frowned, not his usual scowl of eager concentration but something much colder. “Just because you don’t give a Shrivelfig for your family, it doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t care about ours. My da’s health’s not so good, and my mum can’t run the place on her own. Some of us actually take it seriously when the people we love need us. It’s this Gryffindor thing you might have heard of – loyalty.”
Sirius jerked back as if he’d been hexed. “Yes, but loyalty to what? What about our Comrades? What about our ideals? What about our sodding responsibility to do something good? To fix everything that’s going wrong?”
“Yeah, Sirius. Taking sweets from first-years is just going to save the bloody world, is it? I’m sure You-Know-Who’s just quaking with fear.”
Sirius stared at him. “But – that’s not what we’re doing. It’s –”
“Isn’t it?” Peter asked, and stood up. “Look, I’m going to find Remus. We’re meant to do Ancient Runes together. Try not to set the dorm on fire.”
“Capitalist rat,” Sirius muttered. In the sudden quiet of Peter’s absence, the accusations lingered. Was that really what they thought? Surely not. Pete was just being sour. He was, Sirius knew, at least as bitter about the whole Lily thing as he was – Wormtail just bothered hiding it, because heaven forbid James think badly of him.
But just in case, something ought to be done. There was a point to prove. It was time for Phase Two.
“Eventually Peter would dive through the air, and catch Michael just before he could strike the sea, and it was lovely the way he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life. Also he was fond of variety, and the sport that engrossed him one moment would suddenly cease to engage him, so there was always the possibility that the next time you fell he would let you go.”
Remus always sat in the same squashy armchair during Party meetings, far enough back to be unobtrusive but far enough forward not to seem as if he was avoiding his friends. The meeting began with the standard ritual of collection and allotment, which had become routine despite Sirius’s theatrics. Once they’d received their chocolate, the second-years snuck out the back, too young to be interested in ideology and too old to be intimidated into dutiful attendance. Remus made a mental outline for his Potions essay as he gazed blankly at the front of the room, at least until his brain alerted him that something new was afoot.
“…and that is why,” Sirius was saying, looming over the crowd in his menacingly furry hat, “the time has come to take our revolution beyond the bounds of the tower. We cannot rest while our brother proletarians in Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw groan and suffer beneath the grinding wheels of capitalism. It is time for the students of Hogwarts to rise together as one to throw off the chains of the bourgeoisie! It is our duty and joyful obligation to lift them up into the light of Communism and unity! We will no longer bear the brutal yoke of marks and exams, as if that was the measure of our worth! We must each be recognised for what we as individuals have to contribute to our happy cooperative! Let those of us who thrive on chopping and stirring be given free use of Slughorn’s cupboards! Let those of us whose talent at Defence can safeguard us all be let into the Restricted Section! Each of us has different strengths, but the Educational-Industrial Complex wants to make each of us the same, interchangeable, to wear us down until we are mere exam-taking, wand-waving automatons! I say we tear down the stone walls of this prison, the barriers between one House and the next, between Herbologist and Astronomer, I say we show our bearded, wrinkled oppressors what we can truly accomplish when we work together with the spirit of brotherhood and revolution in our breasts! What do you say, my Comrades?”
The crowd clapped uncertainly. One third-year raised his hand.
“Yes, Comrade Paul?” Sirius asked.
Paul stood up anxiously. “Er, you know that bit about tearing down the walls? Was that figurative? Because it’s a bit cold at this time of the year for sleeping outside.”
Sirius denied that any actual demolition would take place, and the other Gryffindors relaxed somewhat. After that, a motion to proceed with the liberation of the other Houses was raised and passed, and Sirius assigned tasks – developing slogans, writing pamphlets, researching useful Charms, and so on.
Remus felt a headache coming on. No good could come of this. And they’d done so well that year at not losing House points by the bushel-full, what with James’s newly developed sense of responsibility and Sirius’s sulking. No one’d had the focus to well and truly sabotage any chance Gryffindor might have of ever winning the House Cup with the four of them within its walls. But all that was clearly about to change.
“The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.”
Sirius thought that the pamphlet and banner campaign was going splendidly. Not that there had been any actual recruits yet from the other Houses, of course, but there were signs everywhere of consciousness being raised to new levels. The Ravenclaws had attempted a counter-pamphleting initiative detailing the mechanics of free market economics, but this had come to little due to intra-House conflict between the Keynesians and the monetarists, as well as the fact that their shortest pamphlet was over three feet long and no one in any other House had actually gotten through one. The Hufflepuffs had taken to casting Temporary Sticking Charms on all of their possessions whenever they left their dormitories, in case of hand-to-hand abolition of private property. The Slytherins discussed their families’ wealth and influence at every opportunity, and had not yet caught on to the fact that the Gryffindors were not actually insulted when they said things like “Communism is for plebes.”
The library sit-in for Restricted Section privileges had been hastily aborted after a number of Slytherins had joined, as it was obvious to any thinking person that the Slytherins were a pack of capitalist Bundimuns who lacked all sympathy for the working classes.
Gryffindor lost House points at the rate of one per pamphlet and five per banner. McGonagall’s lips had narrowed so much as to be in danger of disappearing permanently, but Sirius was rather looking forward to finding out what would happen once Gryffindor got into negative points. He was taken aback to realize that this was something he and James had not yet achieved, and was glad steps were being taken to address this oversight before they left school. Some of his comrades showed signs of flagging spirits, but he’d addressed this though a letter-writing campaign to the Gryffindor parents, which resulted in dramatically increased chocolate reserves and a corresponding upswing in morale. He also gave a special address called “House Points are for Capitalists,” in which he explained that the bourgeois values of mindless acquisition must be rejected in order for the revolution to succeed. When this did not have the desired effect, he instituted a new intra-House system of Communist Credits, in which points could be earned by contributions of money, chocolate, special services to the Party, or Outstanding-grade notes, as well as by publicly Charming Slytherins or their possessions red. Sirius himself led scoring in the final category, though only because James held Lily the Traitor’s good graces in higher regard than brotherhood and the cause of justice.
Things were going really well, Sirius told himself as he ran down the corridor away from the dungeons, where he’d just given a roomful of Slytherins blood red wand-and-sickle emblems on their foreheads. The poor bastards were still trying to Finite Incantem each other, as if his spells hadn’t been beyond that since fourth year.
It was almost like old times, really. Except that there was no one running with him. No Prongs giving their location away with his ungodly cackling, no Pete glancing worriedly behind him, no Moony swearing in a continuous low monotone. Poor tossers are missing out on all the fun, he thought.
When he got back to the Gryffindor common room, panting as the Fat Lady swung shut behind him, Remus glanced up briefly and then returned his attention to the game of chess he was playing with Peter. James flailed an arm at him from behind Lily the Traitor, in what could have been either a greeting or a symptom of oxygen deprivation. Not even the second-years swapping chocolate frog cards by the fireplace seemed interested in his new and obviously extremely daring and brilliant adventure. Revolutionary leaders just didn’t get any respect any more.
Sirius stomped up to the dormitory without even bothering to award himself Communist Credits for his exploits, attended by only another unreadable flicker of Moony’s gaze.
“Peter spoke indignantly. ‘You don't think I would kill him while he was sleeping! I would wake him first, and then kill him. That's the way I always do.’”
Sirius was, Remus felt, a textbook example of many things, not least of which was what happened to children who could only attract their parents’ notice by misbehaving. Mildly sadistic pranks. Long hair. Inappropriate liaisons. Political revolution. Remus imagined there probably were limits to what his friend would do to draw attention, but he’d not yet seen any hint of them. It was possible that he’d been Sorted into Gryffindor instead of Slytherin on basis of this trait alone – the concept of getting away with things was not only foreign but actually repugnant to him. What was the point of causing trouble if no one knew who’d done it? Why humiliate someone anonymously when you could sign your name on his face? Every piece of Communist propaganda in Hogwarts was decked out in unmistakable Gryffindor red. If it’d been Slytherins plotting revolution, they’d have blamed it on the Hufflepuffs.
Occasionally, in his least generous moments, Remus had suspected Sirius of becoming an Animagus primarily so that Remus could never stop needing him. Sirius’s affection was both more selfish and more selfless than that of anyone else Remus knew. He gave everything and demanded everything. He had no boundaries. Those he loved became part of him, cared for and defended as fiercely as his own limbs but also controlled, pushed, taken for granted. And now his best friends, his extra arms, were detaching from him. James was preoccupied, Pete had always resented Sirius’s closeness with Prongs, and Remus – well. He was still there. Just, perhaps, not quite as there as he’d once been.
At Party meetings, Remus sometimes wondered if he was watching a Communist takeover or a very slow, very public mental breakdown. As Padfoot’s rhetorical excesses climbed to new heights of doublethink and hyperbole, the anger and desperation in his fur-topped face became more and more visible, at least to someone who really knew him, at least to someone who understood that the things he wanted his friends to share could never be collected up and divvied out from the common room tables.
The next night, Sirius jinxed a second-year girl for sneaking a treacle tart up from the kitchens for her personal consumption, and Remus realized that something had to be done. He’d get Prongs to talk to Sirius. Prongs was the one he was really showing off for, in that awful, obvious way of his. And if James didn’t start paying attention… Remus really didn’t want to be there when Padfoot reinvented the gulag.
“Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.”
The formation of the Central Committee, Sirius thought happily, was the best idea yet. James had been right – it was too much work just for him, and with more people in charge, a great deal more could be accomplished. Besides which, it was much more fun to plot the overthrow of the school with his friends. Or with James and, well, other people. Peter obviously hadn’t the dedication for it, and Remus had declined a position on the Committee with a faint smile and a murmur of, “I prefer to be the invisible power behind the throne, thanks.” And he’d been unable to think of an excuse to exclude Marlene, what with her intense enthusiasm and, well, the glaring. Frank and Vanshi were the token sixth-years, and Phoebe was let on for decorative purposes. Together, they formed the Central Leadership Committee of the Gryffindor People’s Glorious Democratic Communistic Front, a name that was itself designed by the Committee. The CLCGPGDCF was in charge of the collection and distribution of goods, the coordination of the propaganda drive, and the settling of disputes between Comrades and accusations of capitalism or treason.
With so many people working to perfect the Communist system, Sirius was sure that some breakthrough was at hand. Soon it would all start running properly. The details would finally be worked out and there would be no more private chocolate caches to discover, no more flagging attendance at meetings, no more absurd arguments about whether Amanda or Cynthia had greater need of Amanda’s pink dragonhide boots for the upcoming Hogsmeade weekend. Surely the last few kinks were already being worked out, and soon there would be harmony and brotherhood and everyone would realize how much better off they were as Communists, and next year when he was gone and Frank had taken over, maybe they’d decide to put up a statue of him in remembrance of his dedication to the public good. Sirius thought it might look nice over by the fireplace.
“Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change.”
For three days, Sirius walked like a hero, a prophet among his chosen people. His grin poured benevolent pride across the common room. Remus sat back in his armchair of choice and indulged in some private smugness at the success of his intervention. He’d done well. He’d appealed to James’s sense of self-importance, both as Sirius’s best mate and as Head Boy, and persuaded him to step in while disaster could still be averted. And Sirius had a whole committee to boss around and James spent less time in storage cupboards and no one had been hexed in three days.
But, because he was Remus, it was obvious that such luck couldn’t last. Things began to go wrong on Friday, when Sirius came bounding into the dormitory where Remus was attempting to study for an Arithmancy quiz.
“Prongs! Why aren’t you at the Committee meeting? It’s already started.”
James finished shrugging on his Quidditch robes. “’S nothing important today, is it? I promised King I’d help him work on his Double Eight Loops.”
“Nothing important?” Sirius demanded. “We have to approve the new banner slogans! And finalize the acquisitions budget for Hogsmeade tomorrow! You know how divided the Committee is on the Sneakoscope issue! I need you!”
James waved an imperious hand. “I hereby authorize you to vote on my behalf. Now if that’s sorted, I need to get down to the pitch.”
“No it is not bloody sorted, Prongs. You have a responsibility here, why don’t you just tell King you’ll help him play with his balls tomorrow?”
“You know I’m going to Hogsmeade with Lily tomorrow, but yes, you’re right. I do have a responsibility. Because I’m the captain of the team, and the Ravenclaw game is coming up, and while you may have forgotten how this works, I am not going to have a clumsy Keeper just because my ex-Beater wants to make a shopping list.”
Remus winced. The reference to Sirius’s permanent expulsion from the team was a dirty play. It was high on their list of forbidden topics, because it was a consequence of that night last year, and Sirius was therefore not allowed to blame it on anyone else (not even Snape), and it was too large a thing to talk about without jokes and righteous indignation.
“Fuck you, too,” Sirius said, and swept out.
James laughed ruefully and glanced at Remus, briefly catching his gaze.
Remus looked away.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever fully understand the dynamics of his dormitory, which seemed at once inexplicable and inevitable. What else could be expected, if one combined four mismatched boys in a single room under a low flame for seven years, stirring in one wolf bite, one invisibility cloak, one Ancient and Most Noble House, simmering until precipitate emerged in the form one dog, one stag, and one rat, adding a bucket of hormones and a pinch of betrayal, a Golden Snitch, a magical map, a whiff of jealousy, a Head Boy’s badge, a suggestion of the future… In other dorms, the students seemed to pair off or form groups more casually, without these tidal pulls of jealous resentment and possessive loyalty. Remus wondered what it would be like, sometimes, to have friends he could escape from, who did not expect him to belong to them, first and always. He wondered, but not too hard, because he did have other friends, like Alice, like David from Ravenclaw, and he liked them, and studied with them, and chatted in the halls, and they didn’t know his secrets, and they didn’t feel quite like real friends at all.
From the outside, he imagined the four of them must look like an unchanging unit, a perpetual quadrangle of shoulders crowded together over a library table or dormitory bed, but from within it wasn’t constant at all. Internal bonds waxed and waned with pranks and spats and Quidditch games, James and Sirius usually tightest but not always, not when only Pete would listen to Prongs moaning about Lily, or when Pads went through his Muggle literature phase. There was the friend you talked to about ice cream flavours and the friend you talked to about combining a Shrinking spell with a Hover Charm and the friend you talked to when your parents might not like you any more. And when you all lived in the same room, it was impossible not to know who was, at any given time, slighting who for whom.
James didn’t come to the Party meeting at all that night, and Maggie got caught with money in her toad bank, and after Sirius was done with her she had to go to the Hospital Wing.
The following evening, half a dozen Sneakoscopes were positioned throughout the common room. No one would sit near them.
Remus cast petrifying spells on each one after Sirius went to sleep.
“In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
“Lils needs her Ancient Runes notes back from Marlene,” James said as soon as he sat down at the table. It was lunchtime, and Remus and Peter hadn’t gotten back from Herbology yet.
Sirius glowered at his bastard of an adopted brother, who was guzzling pumpkin juice as if he didn’t owe him about five different apologies. “So? How is this my problem?”
James grabbed the Cornish pasties and helped himself to several of them. “You’re the grand high leader thing. Marlene has some Communist theory about why she should keep the notes. Tell her she’s wrong. Make her give them back.”
It was at the word thing that Sirius’s expression splintered and reformed into a sneering mask he’d cribbed from his mother. “And exactly why would I want to do that, James?” he asked.
James gave him a questioning look. “Well, because they’re her notes,” he said as if explaining something to a particularly dim Hufflepuff. “And she has a project due.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” Sirius said. “Those are the Party’s notes, which Evans contributed to the cause as per the dictates of the Gryffindor Communist Charter of Rights and Obligations, paragraph seven. Marlene has a project due for the class as well, and as her current average is lower than Lily’s, I’m afraid we must conclude that her need for the notes is greater. However, I’m sure Evans will find a selection of perfectly adequate substitutes if she checks the Circular File of Communal Knowledge in the common room.”
James was turning an interesting shade of red. “That is not on,” he growled. “Those are Lily’s notes. My girlfriend is not going to fail her project because of your stupid revolution.”
“Evans is very clever,” he agreed. “I’m sure she’ll find a way to make do.”
Remus and Peter arrived then, dropping their book bags onto the floor noisily and climbing into their seats. “What’s Lily going to do?” Remus asked.
“He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding; and the elegance of his diction, even when he was swearing, no less than the distinction of his demeanour, showed him one of a different cast from his crew.”
“What’s Lily going to do?” Remus asked as he sat down, glancing quickly between his two friends. It was obvious from Sirius’s face that something was very wrong – when angry, he exploded rather messily, but when hurt he folded down into an aristocratic icicle – and it was obvious from James’s tomato-red complexion that he didn’t particularly care. It normally took quite a bit to hurt Padfoot’s feelings, as he tended to operate under the premise that if something sounded uncomplimentary, he must have heard it wrong, but James had been wearing him down for some time.
“Fail her Runes project, because Pratfoot here won’t get her notes back from McKinnon,” James spat.
“I feel I ought to point out that this whole conversation is rather irregular,” Sirius said mildly. “Complaints about the distribution of commonly held goods are to be brought before the Commissioner for Justice, who will in turn report any legitimate concerns to the full Committee.”
“But Marlene is the Commissioner for Justice.”
Sirius raised an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting that Commissioner McKinnon would allow personal considerations to outweigh her devotion to the public good?”
James boggled at him. “Are you suggesting that she wouldn’t?”
Sirius tsked gently. “Disregarding established procedure, accusing a Commissioner of corruption… It doesn’t speak well of you, Potter. This behaviour may have to be brought up before the Committee. I wouldn’t be surprised if you and Evans were denied access to the Circular File entirely.”
Remus winced. James slammed his fist down onto the table, spilling pumpkin juice onto himself. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “You’ve finally gone barking mad. This is not some game any more, Pads. Our N.E.W.T.s are coming up, and if you think the Head Boy and Girl are going to fail them because you’re in some kind of political snit, then you and I and Professor McGonagall are going to be having a little chat.”
“I assure you, the only one of us who regards this as a game is you, and you would be wise to reconsider.”
Remus thought that someone ought to storm off at that point, but no one did. Sirius continued reducing his food to small, perfect cubes, and James continued to attack his pasties as if they contained Padfoot’s face.
“If it’s just the notes,” Pete ventured after a minute of horrible silence, “why not use a Duplicating Charm on them?”
James and Sirius both glared at him.
“Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.”
Sirius sat on the floor of the common room, back against the wall, moodily conjuring glass balls and then imploding them, hating everything indiscriminately. James for being an utter arse and Remus for not doing anything about it, Pete for his stupid voice and Lily for her stupid notes, Marlene for her bossy face and Karl Marx for his wretched books that didn’t fix anything, and himself, for being able to get things right any time but when it mattered. Because he could conjure a hovering bauble like the ones the house elves used to hang on the Christmas tree and shatter it inside a shield spell without saying a word, but he didn’t know how to make James the bloody bastard talk to him for five minutes about anything other than Lily or Quidditch or his stupid Head Berk duties or any of the other thousand things apparently more important than Sirius. He didn’t know if he’d failed somehow, failed to turn into the person James wanted him to be, or if James just didn’t need a pretend brother at all any more. He wished, abruptly, that he’d never had his friends, that he’d been sorted properly into Slytherin and spent the last seven years hexing his dormmates and never known what it was like to have anyone want him for nothing more or less than himself.
Oh, Sirius had always known how to make himself wanted, how to make his opinion seem important, his smiles a valuable commodity. He knew how to make a girl blush and a boy slap him on the back, and how to make anyone at all laugh. But to be wanted without those things – that had been an act of inexplicable grace. And now it seemed to be over, and he couldn’t even be properly furious about it, because he knew he’d never deserved it to begin with. Things were coming – war and N.E.W.T.s and the time in life when you have to cook your own supper – and he didn’t know how to make himself fit into those pictures. He felt like a discarded toy, and he wanted to jump up and down and scream, I’m here, but that would be a sure sign he’d lost the plot, and he was hoping to hold onto sanity a bit longer than some of his relatives.
“Oh, there you are!” Phoebe said, dropping gracefully down onto the floor beside him. “What’re you doing?”
He shrugged. “Exploding things.”
She giggled as if this was clever. He glanced up at her. She was giving him the look and edging closer. Phoebe wasn’t exactly discriminating, but she was the prettiest girl in the tower.
He conjured a red glass flower and handed it to her.
She giggled again. “How’d you do that?”
He leaned into her hair and whispered, “Magic.”
“You’re rather good at it.”
“I’m rather good at a lot of things.”
“Anything else you could show me?”
He ran a finger up her arm. “Not here.”
Her lips quirked. “I hear the broom cupboards are lovely at this time of year.”
He rose, and offered her a hand up. She took it, pulled him into her, and murmured, “Charms corridor, ten minutes. Bring your hat.” Then she winked and swept off in a flurry of skirts and too-sweet floral perfume.
Sirius leaned back against the wall and smirked. Maybe he was losing his friends, but there was still his hat, and the prospect of Phoebe spread over an unused desk, and a whole bloody revolutionary movement. He would make the best of what he had.
“The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had had their dinners.”
There was no one, Remus knew, who believed in performative language like a wizard. For this was what human magic came to: the power of words to alter the world. Anyone could use language to describe things. But when a wizard spoke the right words in the right way, tortoises became teapots and nothing became something. People died from words and were healed by them. And it was difficult, sometimes, to keep in mind that not all things could be made true just by saying them. And it was especially difficult, he thought, for Sirius, whose boundary between should be and is had always been a bit murky. Sirius believed in things in a way that not even other wizards did. He believed that a werewolf could be trusted with his life. He believed that three twelve-year-olds could become Animagi. He believed that friendship could be transmuted into brotherhood by a throwaway oath in a hidden passageway. He believed that snowball fights could vanquish his enemies and a pirate hat could strike awe into any heart, as long as it had a long enough plume. He believed that love poets were really in love, and that there were no limits to what one could do to protect a friend or correct an injustice. He believed that when the residents of Gryffindor tower pledged their chocolate to the Communist cause, it meant that a revolution had occurred.
Just now, it seemed he believed that if he drowned himself in firewhiskey, then everything would be all right. He was sitting on the floor in a darkened corner of Honeydukes’ cellar, bottle cradled against his chest, head tilted back against the wall. There was a method to the pattern of places Sirius chose to hide out in, involving variables ranging from his mood to the weather, and it made Remus want to draw charts. The Honeydukes’ cellar came into play when he wanted somewhere comforting (the smell of sweets), warm (less than usually Byronic), and remote enough that anyone trying to find him would have to make a real effort to do so.
Sirius didn’t react when Remus emerged from the passageway. When he sat down beside him, Sirius held out the bottle without opening his eyes. They passed it back and forth slowly, the heat and alcohol eating away at Remus’s tension until he slouched bonelessly against the wall, the headache that had clasped a tight band around his temples relaxing for the first time that day. It was peaceful, the smell of cocoa and butterscotch evoking childhood, and safety, and Remus decided that he was hiding out, too.
Eventually Sirius shifted, sliding a bit further down the wall, and his knee bent out, coming to rest against Remus’s calf. It was bony and a little heavy, but Remus didn’t move away. There’d been something he meant to say to Sirius, sometime, but he couldn’t think of it. It didn’t really matter. He couldn’t say that James was just going through a phase, or that things would go back to normal, or that they would be all right. Maybe it was better to merely sit there, in the dark, touching just enough to prove they weren’t alone, and let Sirius go on believing whatever it was that he still could.
“Just as to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.”
It was Phoebe’s idea, another plot to recruit the other Houses, but Sirius was willing to take credit for the party nonetheless. It was called the Bloc Party and a huge red flag obscured the entire wall opposite the common room door, and every guest upon arrival was issued a fur hat (none quite so impressive as his, of course) and a wand and sickle armband. The slogan “Communism means our firewhiskey is your firewhiskey” seemed to be going down a lot better than “you have nothing to lose but your chains” had, and seemingly every Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw in fourth year and above was partaking freely. Pete had been put in charge of music, and the Charmed record player was currently blaring out “We don’t need no ed-u-ca-tion! We don’t need no thought con-trol!” so loudly that the furniture seemed to be vibrating. Pete himself, hat abandoned and House tie knotted around his head, was attempting to sway against Cassandra. Sirius thought that someone probably ought to stop him, for his own good.
The room revolved pleasantly, and Sirius was sweating with intoxication and the heat of too many bodies pressed against his own. He pushed his way over to the corner, where Moony stood behind the table they were using as a bar. Once his drink had been topped off, he leaned against the wall and watched Remus chatting with some Ravenclaw drinking (of all things) butterbeer. Everyone had thought that Remus couldn’t dance until they’d been over to his house for New Years and seen him fox-trotting his grandmother about the living room. Then they’d realized he just couldn’t dance with anyone under fifty. He was, however, excellent at pouring drinks. Sirius hadn’t believed they needed a barkeep, originally, but then there had been the incident with the purple stuff stuck to the ceiling, and they’d won him over. Moony said he liked doing it, anyway, and Sirius had been unable to tell if he was being honest or having one of his self-sacrificing moments. Sirius hoped it wasn’t the latter, because in that case he’d have to be pummelled.
It occurred to him that this was the second time he’d gotten pissed that week, but this seemed unproblematic. He knew from his father’s example that he’d be all right until he started drinking scotch before lunch. And in this state he wasn’t fussed about James sneaking upstairs with Lily the Traitor, or about Phoebe throwing herself at some Hufflepuff who was approximately seven feet tall and built like a barn. He wondered if she’d thought up the party just as an excuse to get her kittenish little claws into him, then reminded himself that paranoia was among the family traits he was trying to avoid.
His cup was empty again. He pushed himself off of the wall and the room twirled faster. He tapped Moony for a refill, and his friend gave him a sharp look before complying. He knew he’d be cut off soon, but that was all right. One more ought to be enough. He blinked. Something hurtled into his side. It was a girl. Cynthia. Cynthia had nice… somethings. They all did. He allowed himself to be pulled back toward the dancers. Firewhiskey spilt over his fingers. His Housemates pressed in all around, a mass of bouncing bodies. His Comrades. They were beautiful, really, beautiful and sad and ridiculous and, just then, a bit sticky. He wanted to save them and he wanted them to know it and he wanted them to say, “Thank you, Sirius Black, for saving us. By doing so you have shown your worth and done so well that your entire family has been redeemed, back for the last ten generations.” Except that wasn’t right. Those bastards didn’t have anything to do with him any more. Didn’t bloody want to be redeemed, did they?
Something hurt. Possibly his stomach. Possibly he was hungry. Supper seemed a very long time ago. He downed the rest of his drink instead.
“Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest.”
Of all the terrible things that Sirius believed, by far the worst was that people ought to get what they deserved. This conviction was one of the few legacies of his parents that he’d kept. Where they believed that desserts were determined by class and breeding, he discriminated according to acts and character. But he was equally unforgiving.
Sometimes, Remus looked into his friend’s hard, demanding face and blamed himself. Because Sirius had no idea how to absolve himself for his sins, and of all his sins, the worst was committed against Remus. And Remus, who knew him, who had not forgotten how it all started, had gone back to his dorm, instead of the Hospital Wing, the day that Severus Snape nailed his hand to the table with his Potions knife. They’d been partnered by Slughorn, and his talent for the class, never substantial, had been annihilated by the immanence of the moon. It had ended predictably. Cauldron exploded. Failed assignment, Snape’s first. They’d been kept after to clean up. Remus Scourgified the cauldrons. Snape scraped fragments of liver off the table. Remus didn’t even see it happen, but Snape had only said “Oops,” and it hadn’t sounded like an apology. It had been strange, feeling pain like that while not half out of his mind from transformation. Snape retrieved his knife and walked out of the room, and Remus had sagged against the table and believed for the first time that perhaps the Slytherin did have what it would take to be a Death Eater, after all. He wondered how much that was due to the influence of Snape’s friends, and how much to the influence of his own.
Remus had wrapped his hand in one end of his scarf, picked up his bag, and walked back to the dorm, where Sirius was waiting for him to show up and research spells for a prank. “Snape,” he’d hissed when he saw the wound, dribbling blood onto the floor, and Remus had not denied it. “I’ll kill him,” he’d said, but then he’d cast the healing Charms he’d learnt for moons and dragged him down to see Pomfrey, and Remus had forgotten that it was not a figure of speech. At least until he’d woken up the next morning, and everything had been wrong.
He was certain that Sirius still believed Snape had deserved to be ripped apart by the wolf. It had seemed fitting to him, poetic even. His guilt was purely for the danger he’d put Remus in, and James. His only sin was that of betrayal. But Sirius had read his Dante. He knew where traitors ranked, and if there was no Satan to chew him to pieces, he would take the job on himself. Sirius had never known how to let go.
Just then, he was clinging to his revolution with tooth and nail and an ever-increasing viciousness. At least half the tower had been caught in some sort of infraction by then, and with each punishment, the possibility of mercy dwindled. No one was prepared to let anyone else get away with something he’d suffered for. Amanda and Cynthia weren’t speaking any more. Paul hadn’t been seen in the common room in a week. And still, somehow, Sirius seemed to believe that hexing and humiliating his Housemates was actually going to turn them into good little Communists. Remus felt that said something rather saddening about how he’d been raised.
“Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love.”
“So,” Frank said, after the official Committee Meeting had broken up and it was just the boys left, too lazy to drag themselves out of their armchairs. “You and Phoebe. Or is it you and Cynthia?”
Sirius shrugged, long practiced in burying anything resembling uncertainty well beneath a smooth veneer of arrogant indifference. “Just doing my Communist duty, sharing my assets with all those in need.”
Frank laughed. “We should start lending you out to the other Houses. You’d do wonders for recruitment.”
“Phoebe too,” Sirius said, his grin growing sharper. “She’s very generous that way.”
“Hey, we should all do our parts. I’m up for it. Anything for the cause, right?”
“We should start sign-ups. Divide and conquer. You in, James?”
James picked his head up off the couch. “Yeah, absolutely, as long as you’re the one who explains it to Lily.” He smirked in anticipation.
Sirius raised a contemplative eyebrow. “Lily,” he said. “You’re on to something there. They’d line up down the hall for her. Half of Hogwarts’ll be gagging to go Red.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Marriage is an empty bourgeois institution,” Sirius said glibly. “Its hypocritical pseudo-morals are offensive to any true Communist. The brotherhood of workers shares all.”
James let himself fall back onto the couch in disgust. “You share anything you want, but any bloke besides me who touches her is going to get a nice share of an Entrail-Expelling Curse, and that’s before Lily gets to them.”
Frank sniggered. “So you mean you four don’t share everything?”
James began to look a bit purple. “Lily is not a thing. She is a person. There is no sharing of people.”
“Well that’s a very capitalist way of looking at it,” Frank said rather pompously. “I don’t know if you’ve taken the time to properly read The Manifesto, but it very clearly states-”
“I don’t care if it sings the bloody national anthem. This is my girlfriend we’re talking about.”
Sirius raised an eyebrow. “So you admit that you put her before your commitment to your brother proletarians?”
James’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t do this, Padfoot. Do not try to turn this into some sort of choice.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m just trying to fully understand your position, here.”
“That’s bollocks,” he said bitterly. “We both know exactly what you’re asking, and it’s childish and ridiculous. Lily would never ask me to choose like that.”
“No,” Sirius told him. “But then, she doesn’t have to, does she?”
“Always when he said, ‘Peter Pan has spoken,’ it meant that they must now shut up, and they accepted it humbly in that spirit; but they were by no means so respectful to the other boys, whom they looked upon as just ordinary braves.”
“Why are there firsties on my bed?” Peter asked when he and Remus got back from the library.
Sirius (who’d been banned from doing Ancient Runes assignments with them for insisting on writing his answers in limerick form) smiled fondly at the children gathered on Pete’s bed. “They’re gathering the luminous pearls of my wisdom.”
Remus’s mind went blank with horror. “I don’t care what he said, arson will not get you out of homework assignments, girls’ knickers cannot be used as a form of currency, griffins do not make friendly and affectionate pets, and Unforgivables are illegal even when used on Slytherins.”
The first-years looked like they were getting ideas.
“Oh Moony, it’s nothing like that,” Sirius said, though he looked rather as if he was getting ideas as well. “They’re thinking of forming a taskforce.”
“I see.” Remus perched on the end of his own bed, which itself showed signs of recent unauthorized occupation. “What kind of taskforce?”
“A taskforce on un-Communist activities,” Kingsley answered smartly.
“That’s nice,” Peter said. “Do you think you could have your taskforce on the floor?”
Kingsley gave him a suspicious look, clearly feeling the request bordered on an assertion of private property.
“Come on,” Sirius said. “Let’s head downstairs. I think the taskforce formation would be helped along by a bit of chocolate.”
The children trooped out of the room behind Padfoot. Kingsley was at the rear, and cast a last appraising glance around the dorm before he let the door swing closed.
Pete threw himself down on his now vacant bed. “It was bad enough when Padfoot’s fan club was just those stupid girls.”
Remus smirked. “He always did like getting new toys.”
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.”
“What are you going to do to Alice?” Lily demanded, green eyes narrowed to mossy slits.
Sirius gave her an innocent look. “What’re you on about?”
“Alice. I was there when Kingsley came round doing his ridiculous inspections, and I want to know what you’re going to do to her.”
The way her arms were crossed so tightly across her chest did nice things for her breasts, but he decided not to mention that. “The same thing as would happen to anyone else, of course.”
“Don’t try that with me. We all know perfectly well that your absurd punishments are based on nothing more than how bad your mood is.”
Sirius lounged back as if the armchair were a throne. “Well if that’s the case, I have to say this conversation isn’t doing much to improve my mood, Evans.”
Lily’s lip curled. “Look, Black, you may be the grand high poomba of your delusional little world, but I am still the Head Girl, and if Alice – if anyone – goes to the Hospital Wing, I guarantee that McGonagall will be handing out more than just detentions. So think carefully before the meeting tonight, because after last year I don’t think you need that much more rope to hang yourself with.”
Something unpleasant coiled in Sirius’s stomach. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe I don’t,” she said. “But you do. And whatever your feelings for me, if you take them out on my friend I will see that you regret it.”
“Fine,” he spat. “You have my bloody word. Alice will get no more than James would, in her place.” Lily raised a knowing eyebrow. “Or Pete.” The eyebrow did not descend. “Or Remus.”
Lily nodded briskly and turned away. “I would expect no less of someone so committed to the ideals of brotherhood,” she called over her shoulder, her tone unreadable.
Sirius picked absently at the worn spot in the red upholstery, making it worse.
Part 3