InsaneJournal

WHO: Eames and Sirius Black (and the Aidan)
WHAT: One last go on the pic-n-mix plot thingy. Lucky boys.
WHEN: Yesterday, just after lunchtime (April 27th)
WHERE: Eames' place
RATING: Apparently this is Evil Genius level? I have no idea. Standard warnings for Eames and Sirius in the one room for any length of time, I suppose. With added phlegm.
STATUS: Complete, closed




“I’m dying,” Sirius moaned, sprawled melodramatically over Eames’ couch. “I’m actually dying. When I die, which I will be doing in the near future by the way, don’t let Remus have my bike. He hates her. He’ll just sell her for drug money. By which I mean books and cardigans.”

He groaned loudly, rolling over until he was lying on his stomach, face smushed against the arm of the sofa, dark puppy-dog eyes fixed towards the kitchen. “Where’s my wand?” he muttered, the cushion swallowing his words quite efficiently as he clawed around the seat for it, digging his fingers into the space behind the cushion while also managing to not move an inch of his actual body.

No’one could do being ill quite like Sirius Black. Even a bit of a sniffle turned into a full blown drama. To be perfectly honest, he might as well still be eight years old right now. “AHA!” Sirius closed his fingers around the wand, buried down the back of the sofa - Merlin knew how it had got there - and flicked it vaguely towards the open kitchen door, muttering something latin into his cushion. The sound of the kettle switching on and mugs starting to move around on their own accord floated through from the other room.

“Eames,” he moaned. “Help me. I’m only twenty one. I’m too young and full of life and my hair’s too good for me to die.”

Eames sat at the other end of the couch and pretty much ignored Sirius. He had a half-empty mug of tea, a headache, a horrendous dose of the sniffles, a blanket (stolen from the huge pile of blankets on the living room floor where he’d woken up in the morning before crawling back to his own bed for a few hours) wrapped round him and the Aidan was sitting on his head, doing a lizardy dance. First, the front right foot and the back left foot were lifted into the air for a few seconds. Then it lowered those feet and lifted the other two. Then it just repeated itself, over and over again. Much like Sirius, actually. It was slightly less annoying than Sirius’ incessant whining, though, so Eames just let it stay there.

“What in the name of fuck would you like me to actually do, Sirius?” he managed to say before he had to sneeze. Ugh.

“I don’t knoooow,” Sirius groaned into his cushion. “Make sure a suitable shrine is created once I kick the bucket?” He felt like someone had stuffed his skull and nostrils full of tissue paper. He blamed Eames for this. Sirius decided to tell him that.

“I blame you for this,” he announced. “You and your bloody tree.” It was odd, having a fresh set of childhood memories that had really only taken place yesterday. It didn’t help the pounding that was pushing against his temples, fuelling his headache, like a someone playing a really crap drum solo in his skull. “Godric, what kind of childhood did you have where jumping into freezing water was a good plan? I thought I was the devil child.”

“My tree? I’m not the one who wanted to go higher up, am I?” Eames retorted, finally looking round at the younger man. Aidan grabbed a hold of his hair with its little toes as he moved, and then jumped down onto the back of the couch to run over to see what Sirius was doing. Huh. Eames just settled for taking a drink of tea.

“As was probably very obvious to those of us who weren’t eight years old at the time, my childhood was spent keeping out of the way of my very busy and incredibly important parents. I read a lot of books, drew a lot of pictures and learnt how to behave at dull social functions hosted by my mother. But yes, I’m an only child for that reason; I got in the way,” he admitted with a shrug. He’d long since come to terms with the fact that he’d been a bit of a handful as a child, and his parents had struggled to put up with him. All three of them had jumped at the chance for him to head off to boarding school. “Any chance I got to do anything vaguely interesting or fun, I took it, and that includes talking to anyone who would listen to me, and jumping off of trees into freezing cold rivers. Even if it meant dying of the cold again.”

There was a salamander running along the top of the sofa, which Sirius thought was probably weird, but he couldn’t be bothered questioning Eames and Huck’s choice of pet. He even let it climb into his precious hair. What was the point crying over hair when he was going to die in the next few hours anyway?

“Please. If there’s one thing I learnt during my time as the ‘young Master Black’.” One hand lifted lazily to add some much-needed air quotes. “It’s that the ones who throw the most teeth-achingly dull social functions that are the most crazy. She probably had a wild youth.”

He tried to smirk, but it seemed to be difficult when every space inside his head was full of phlegm. Sirius groaned yet again, leaning over the arm of the sofa to catch the mug of coffee that sailed through from the kitchen. It was bloody hot. Sirius winced through his teeth before placing it down on the floor beside the sofa and leaning over to try and steal Eames’ blanket.

“Piss off and get your own,” Eames grumbled at Sirius’ attempted blanket-theft. Then he actually managed a smirk when he saw where the Aidan was nesting. He took another drink of tea and absently wished for painkillers, but couldn’t be arsed to move. “Heh. I remember the last time I was round at my parents’ house, and my father got amazingly smashed on Pernod after dinner. He actually wanted to talk to me, which was somewhat of a novelty,” he mused, trying not to think that the reason he’d actually gone home was because Arthur had just dumped him after Mal’s funeral, and he’d somewhat foolishly thought it might be a relaxing place to hole up for a week. Not exactly the best time of his life, really, which went some way to explaining his shitty thought processes.

“He decided I should know about how he had got together with my Mother, which was frankly something I never really wanted to find out or felt any burning need to know, but he was going to talk, so I had to listen. Apparently, Mother used to be quite the life and soul of the party.” He paused at that point to dig out some tissues and clear his nose, then finished his tea in case it would make his throat stop feeling itchy. It didn’t. “Dancing til all hours, drinking whatever was going... Oh, he even told me how she’d get random people to take tequila shots with her, only she’d make them hold the lemon wedge between their teeth for her, and then she’d return the favour for them. I still can’t quite put that image together with the woman I know as my mother,” he said with a puzzled look on his face.

Sirius listened to the whole story with his eyes shut, head lolling lazily back against the cushions of the sofa, a smirk curling at the corners of his mouth and the Aidan crawling lazily down one side of his face. It tickled. Sirius couldn’t be bothered thinking about stuff today. He was ill. He was quite happy - or as happy as a boy with a cold ever was - sitting here, squabbling over a blanket and listening to Eames’ weird stories.

“I used to know a girl who did that,” he said, sniffing loudly. “The tequila thing. I think I met her one of the Christmases I was living with James.” He paused, thinking. “Yeah, we used to go over to the Muggle area on the bike and crash parties. What was her name..” Sirius crumpled his brow against his growing headache to try and think. It was hard to remember things when you felt like you had a slug up your nostril, especially things that had happened four years ago when you were pissed. Sirius’ memory of those nights wasn’t brilliant even when he was a picture of health.

“Carol!” Sirius suddenly remembered, straightening up way too quickly so that his head gave a sudden throb of pain. “Ah, fuck. I’m dying,” he slumped back, slapping a cool hand over his forehead. “But, yeah,” he mumbled. “Carol. She was hot, actually. She had fucking brilliant legs. I liked her.”

Eames winced as Sirius moved entirely too quickly, and then realised what name had just been given. “Carol? That’s my mother’s name...” he replied, trailing off as he worked through his new memories from being a child. “Well, you did say we grew up near to each other.”

“Hah,” Sirius gave his usual bark of laughter, wincing once again at his own volume. What was wrong with him and his stupid voice. Why was he so fucking loud? He blamed James for that. “Could have been her. What with our messed up timelines... Ermm...” He pressed the heels of his palms against his closed eyes, pressing until stars exploded in the dark behind his eyelids.

“She was tall. Darkish blonde hair... She danced on tables. Actually...” He hesitated, screwing up his face against his stuffed up nose and growing headache, reaching out to take one of Eames’ tissues. “... She looked a lot like you do when you’ve got your boobs. Shit, it might have been, you know. It was... I was seventeen, so 1976?”

“Christmas, 1976?” This niggled at Eames, but his head was sore, his nose was running and he needed more tea. “Can you magic us up a cup of tea, please? I really cannot be arsed moving, and my head’s trying to explode. I’m sure tea will fix it right up.” He busied himself with picking up Ariadne’s camera and flicking through all the pictures until he found one of him as a woman letting tiny Arthur draw on her... his... her? forearm. She was completely unaware of the camera for once, brushing her hair back from her face and laughing because Arthur was drawing on the soft ticklish skin up near her elbow. It reminded him an awful lot of his mother when she was having a good day.

“Did your Carol look like this?” he asked, as he handed over the camera, then shifted his posture and slipped into his mother’s persona and voice, making minor adjustments for age and a lot of gin. “Seriously, darling.. oh, do you mind if I call you that, darling? But seriously, do you think you know her? Do you really? And could you be a dear and fetch me a drink? G and T, there’s a love,” he said as he copied one of his mother’s gestures and leant over to pat Sirius on the arm. Sitting back, he eased back into himself again and groaned as his head protested at all the moving and talking and oh god, thinking.

Sirius pulled his wand back from where he’d abandoned it on a cushion, muttering more Latin under his breath and listening to the sound of the tea start to make itself in the next room. Honestly. He had no idea how muggles did anything half the time. It was mental. But he knew what Eames meant. He thought he’d felt rubbish this morning, but the headache wasn’t showing any signs of buggering off and he was quickly losing any sense of smell he’d ever had in favor of an excessive amount of phlegm.

Sirius took the camera with a frown, realised he was holding the thing upside-down and flicked it over to look at the picture. Then Eames was moving around and doing one of his mental impression type things, and Sirius gave him a completely baffled look, tearing his gaze away from the picture on the camera display. “You’re completely barking,” he told Eames, “You know that? But yeah... That’s her, I reckon.” He glanced back at the screen. It was familiar. Especially if he tilted his head and squinted a little, but he gave up on that quickly because it made his head hurt more. He was almost certainly dying.

“Yeah,” Sirius gave a small nod. “I met her at some muggle bar me and James used to visit sometimes. I don’t really remember... I think I saw her a few times, though. And it was definitely Christmas because she caught me under some mistletoe.” He gave a sneaky, nostalgic grin, remembered who it was they were discussing, and quickly tried to wipe it away. The animagus stretched, chucking the camera back to Eames just as the magically brewed cup of tea floated over to the sofa, landing with a clink on the coffee table.

“Definitely Christmas. Right. Oh, thanks,” Eames replied absently as the tea appeared, then paused for a moment as something quite terrifying occurred to him. “Sirius, when you say you saw her a few times, what exactly are we talking about? Because... Well. Because...” and he frowned at how unlike himself all this hesitancy was, so he just started thinking out loud. “I was born in September, 1977. Which just happens to be nine months after Christmas, 1976. Which is when you saw someone who is most likely my mother, several times. Please don’t make me think out loud any more.”

“I mean I slept with her,” Sirius yawned, stretching to drape his arms over the back of the sofa, feet lifting to rest on the coffee table. He was actually dying. What he wanted to do was go and crawl back into bed and eat some of that questionable soup Remus had made, then maybe have someone knock him round the head with a lamp so he could get some sleep. He was ill and he couldn’t be bothered softening the blow that he had slept with Eames’ Mother. He’d slept with a lot of people - especially during that stage of his life - and there were only so many girls around that area anyway, and it didn’t mean it mattered. Eames hadn’t even been born then.

Sirius sat up so sharply his head spun, turning to stare at Eames with his dark eyes very wide and his mouth a bit open. “You don’t... I... You were... No,” he finally announced, his tone stubborn. Sirius slumped back into the sofa, found a cushion and used it to bury his face in, blocking out the bloody light and his bloody pounding headache and his bloody blocked nose (Which felt like it still had half the mud in that river lodged inside it). “Stop talking rubbish. I’m ill.”

"I know you're ill, you keep telling me, and ignoring the fact that I'm ill as well, again," Eames snapped, then got out another tissue and blew his nose rather angrily. "And it's hardly rubbish if I'm saying things that are facts, is it? You slept with my mother in December, and I was born the following September. That means... that means there's a fifty percent chance that you're my father, unless Mother was cheating on you as well as my fa-... Oh, fucking hell, this is... Fuck. Can you do some sort of wizardy thing to work this out? Magical paternity tests or something?”

Eames leant forward and lifted his new mug of tea and took a drink, then scowled again and looked over at where Sirius was apparently still trying to climb inside a cushion. “Also, can't you use magic to stop us being ill? Is that not an obvious thing to do?" He sat back and huddled inside his blanket again, and pinched at the bridge of his nose. “You slept with my mother, fucking hell.”

Sirius really was attempting to crawl inside the cushion cover. He was seriously considering just apparating away and pretending this never happened, but he felt like the sensation of apparating, as used to it as he was, would probably make his head explode. And Eames would probably find him, due to his incapacity to shut up for more than two minutes.

“I’m not a fucking healer, Eames,” he snapped back. “If you want me to turn your nose into a pinecone I’ll happily give it a go. But the general rule is not to try and use charms on anyone’s body parts unless you know what you’re fucking doing.” Not that it was a rule he’d stuck to particularly well over his twenty one years, but the principle was still there. It was the thought that counted. And that thought was much easier to concentrate on than the other, louder thought which was currently barging around his skull like a drunk hippogriff.

“I slept with a lot of people!” Sirius defended himself. Badly. “I was seventeen, bloody good looking, and I’d just run away from abusive wizarding aristocracy to live with my best mate. Clearly, I shagged dozens of people. We don’t even know it was her, anyway. There’s probably millions of Carols who fed people lemon slices from their teeth and had really good legs. And anyway, she never said…” He trailed off because, clearly, after that particular brief fling (Which he was pretty sure had overlapped with several others.) he’d gone back to a magical school in Scotland that repelled muggles and only received messages carried by owls. So he hadn’t exactly been reachable to the general public.

“Fuck,” Sirius muttered intelligently, squeezing his eyes tight shut and praying that this was just some mental fever-induced nightmare he was suffering through in a hospital bed, just before the sweet release of death claimed him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He missed a beat. “Oh, fuck.”

“Of course, yes, millions of Carols from Knightsbridge that look like that in 1976,” and Eames gestured at Ariadne’s camera, “and that do that tequila thing, yes. This is why I asked if there were paternity tests. Jesus fucking Christ, will you stop swearing and bloody well think?” He gave no indication if he meant Sirius, himself or the both of them. He got to his feet, eventually, lifted his mug of tea and started to pace slowly, since that was what he liked to do when brainstorming. He went over the facts once more, no doubt something Sirius loved listening to yet again, then started trying to kick-start his fuddled brain.

“If this is all true, if you and my mother... If it’s true, which we’re not saying it is, but if it’s true, then... why can’t I do magic? Why is apparating the worst thing on this planet? Sirius, stop it. Is there anything you can do, or that you know of that would prove things? Would Reg know? He’s older now, he’s bound to know shitloads of magic, right? Oh, fuck me, is he my uncle? Uncle Reg?” Eames rambled as he made slow circuits of the living room. The Aidan was sitting on the back of the couch watching him and licking its eyeballs for whatever reason it had, so the next time Eames passed by, he lifted it up onto his shoulder and started talking quietly to it. “Aren’t you the oddest little creat-”

Eames froze in his steps and then turned to look over at Sirius again. “Kreacher. He’d know, wouldn’t he? If I’m ...oh, fucking hell. If I’m a Black... He’d know.”

He really, really wished Eames would stop pacing around like some mentally deranged pigeon. It wasn’t doing much for his headache. Neither was the rambling. In fact, the rambling was the least pleasant part of this whole bloody thing and he really was starting to consider just silencing Eames for the foreseeable future. Ariadne would probably moan to start with but she’d get over it.

Sirius was just contemplating the logistics of jinxing his friend (Because that was all he bloody well was to Sirius, no matter how few Carols were prancing around Knightsbridge in the mid-seventies.) without breaking any furniture or killing the Aidan, when the older man suddenly stopped and spun to face him. Sirius did his best to look like he didn’t have a care in the world, which was a challenge when some kind of brain/snot mixture was pouring from his nose, and quirked an eyebrow, still sprawled on the sofa.

“He might do,” he shrugged. “He’d be able to tell if anyone had Black blood, to know who to serve. But then he wouldn’t recognise y… any kid of mine as a real Black anyway. I’m disowned, remember? Shame of the family? I can’t even call him these days. Which is, quite frankly, a blessing.” The benefit of Eames’ pacing – and never let it be said that Sirius didn’t look on the bright side – was that now it was a lot easier to steal the blanket. Sirius hoisted it up to his neck, pulling his knees to his chest and resting his chin on top of them. “Godric, I think my brain’s melting.”

“Your brain’s melting? Half my fucking family tree’s just possibly rewrote itself, how the fuck do you think I’m feeling?” Eames grumbled, then went hunting for his coat. “Come on, get up. I want to know, and I’m not showing up at Reg’s without you there to back me up or he’ll hex me and think I’m some sort of deranged psychopath or some bollocks like that. Get up, get up, come on... oh, hang on, shoes...” He kept talking as he wandered into his room looking for the least problematic pair of shoes he owned, and then walked back out a minute later with a pair of trainers in his hands.

“You know, this is all your fault, if you’d just kept yourself to yourself around my mother,” he continued as he pulled the shoes on without even undoing the laces first, “but I accept it was probably very difficult for you because even now, my mother is a very beautiful woman, or she was last time I saw her, which was... a few years ago? But yes, she was gorgeous, and I’ve seen you at parties where there’s, you know... people to talk to and you flirt like you breathe, all the fucking time, and fuck, my head hurts, and we’ve even... Oh, no. No. Oh fuck. Oh, that’s just wrong now.” Eames looked just a bit more ill than he’d looked before everything started going wrong as he remembered exactly what they’d got up to when they first met.

He took a moment or seven, then stood up straight once more, one of his hands shoved deep into his pocket as he constantly checked his totem which was very annoyingly insisting that he was currently wide awake. “Right. Let’s go. Kreacher can tell us we’re delusional and laugh in our faces and tell us to fuck off, everything will be fine, it’ll all be good. Get up. And fine, wear the bloody blanket.”

“Rewrote itself to include a dozen sociopathic, elitist wizards,” Sirius pointed out helpfully. But then Eames was babbling around and telling him to get up when he’d just got comfy with the blanket and all he really wanted to do was find a place to curl up and die. And Merlin Eames could talk when he was in a panic. Sirius thought he was bad. But then he was the only one who had access to the clearly idiotic thoughts filling his head so perhaps he was as bad, but his stupid scratchy throat was just preventing him from verbalising it. Why wasn’t Eames’ scratchy throat making him shut up? Maybe his throat didn’t hurt. That hardly seemed fair...

Sirius was pulled from the pleasant relief his rambling brain was providing him with by Eames standing up straight in front of him, announcing they had to go see Regulus. Sirius didn’t want to see Regulus right now. His brother was difficult enough company when he was in the prime of health, let alone when he had the lurgy or whatever it was currently tormenting his system. In fact, one of the only people Sirius wanted to see less than Regulus right now was Kreacher.

Bloody hell. He was doing a really good job with this whole ‘avoiding the main issue’ thing. Eames should take lessons from him. Sirius rolled his eyes but pulled himself to his feet, blanket still tangled around his shoulders like a cloak.

“Bloody hell,” Sirius commented. “You know how long its been since I wore a cloak?” Then he noticed the face Eames was giving him. “You know with the combination of Regulus’ facial hair and Kreacher’s charming language abusing my senses, I’ll probably puke all over your blanket?” But he recognised that look on Eames’ face, and he really didn’t have the energy to argue right now so he rolled his eyes and offered Eames his arm to apparate them away. Who knew, perhaps he’d get an opportunity to kick Kreacher out of a window. That’d cheer him up. Because Sirius refused to believe the mental nature of their trip was anything other than completely pointless.

Eames hesitated for a second, then glanced at Sirius. “You do realise that with the combination of ick and apparating, I’ll probably puke over the blanket anyway?” Then he grabbed hold of Sirius’s arm and braced himself.