InsaneJournal

Characters: Sirius Black and Andromeda Tonks
Date: July, 1977
Location: Tonks Residence
Rating: PG?
Summary: In which Sirius and Andromeda attempt to sort out how to interact without Sirius leaving in a huff. It mostly works. Sort of.
Status: Complete



The first conversation had gone well. Had been easy. Almost natural. It was reasonable that she would have sought him out. She'd left. He'd left. For different reasons, really- or maybe, deep down, it was the same reason. It was still strange to try to frame it in that terms, though, that his leaving had been like hers. In his mind, there was some sort of intrinsic, undefinable difference vested in the circumstances. But they'd both left. He'd eventually relented to her gentle inquiries though he'd have much preferred the conversation to stay centered around her explaining her own departure. All in all, it had gone well. He'd been happy that she was happy.

So it was strange when their second conversation had gone so poorly. Intellectually, he knew that they way her leaving had been treated, the way it had been explained to him had been a little warped. She'd tried to owl him, to explain things, but his mother had found those letters in short order. And then it had been six years of silence. Six years of behaving as if she had died. His family's view of her leaving may have been skewed, but the pain of it had been real. A pain they weren't allowed to acknowledge, let alone talk about. Bella had only ever talked about it once, one last time to explain the way of it to him, and then she'd never said her sister's name again. It was supposed to have been like Andromeda had died, only they'd never been permitted to grieve the loss. At ten years old, it had been difficult to understand apart from the hurt of it. Even though he thought about it differently now, understood that she'd needed to leave, it didn't erase the past hurt.

And it didn't help that James's wariness of all things Black apart from Sirius did little to put Sirius at ease. He relied on James's moral compass, especially when it came to matters of his family. Under the name Tonks, despite her being disowned, James still saw a Black. The third and fourth conversations had been equally awkward, also ending with Sirius leaving. He just had no idea how to be, how to behave around her. She was a Black, only she wasn't. He'd renounced her, but only because she'd left and he'd been too young to know to do any differently. Only he'd left, too. So they were the same. Only they weren't. And it had been six years. He was so different from the ten-year-old he'd been when she'd left. And she was... a mother. A wife and a mother and a Tonks. It wasn't like with Bella, who had so easily, so visibly still been a Black under the name Lestrange.

But it had been a month. A month since they'd tried doing this, since they'd said much of anything to each other. He got the feeling she was waiting. Or giving him space. Or something- the not knowing, the not understanding how or what she was thinking just by looking at her felt strange.

But he was at her door. The why was still a little ambiguous. But he was there. He wanted it to work. He wanted for there to be something between them, he just had no idea what it might look like. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, he knocked on her door, his brain trying to concoct some way to keep his haphazard impulses in check, to keep himself sociable.

Maybe he should have thought this part out beforehand.