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_rebelrebel ([info]_rebelrebel) wrote in [info]flippedrpg,
@ 2012-09-07 23:04:00

Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Entry tags:ch: knap: james potter, ch: knap: sirius black, p: annalisa, p: veetee

Who: James, Sirius Knap
What: More honesty time
When: Friday afternoon
Where: Hogwarts tunnel
Warnings: Angst?



He knew that he shouldn't wait too long to tell James after he had told Lily everything. It was best that they were all on the same page, and that Rodolphus had as little time as possible to try and use his secrets against him. He knew that if Rodolphus found out that he'd told Lily, but not James, he'd try and use that too. And, in all honesty, he was hoping that, with having told Lily so recently, it would be easier to tell James as well. Which certainly didn't mean that he wasn't worried. He was. It wasn't easy disclosing the things that he'd spent the last six years keeping secret. But he kept telling himself that it was all for the best.

He was curled up in one of the tunnels that they had discovered, his wand lit at the end. It wasn't exactly the most comfortable place he'd ever been, but it was private. He waited until James showed up and was seated across from him, and then decided to just go for it. James knew that he had to tell him something, and he couldn't abide the idea of any sort of small talk in the mean time.

"I did cheat on Lily," he said first, looking fixedly down at where his hand was balanced on his knee, avoiding James' gaze for the time being.


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[info]staghearted
2012-09-08 03:23 am UTC (link)
Of all the things James had expected Sirius to confess, that was not it. He stared at Sirius for a second, and then burst out laughing. He raised a hand to run over his face, and then through his hair, and leaned back against the tunnel wall.

"I don't even know what to say to that," he said after a moment, when he'd recovered, but his mouth was still twitching. It wasn't that he thought it was funny that Sirius had cheated, just... the way the news had been delivered was absolutely ludicrous. "You do realize I'd be much more concerned if you'd slept with her, right?"

Neither of them had actually told him outright that they hadn't slept together, but he knew that they hadn't. Lily had not belonged to Sirius like that; she'd told him that right at the beginning. She had been unsure whether she'd been unfaithful to him, for that matter-- if she'd slept with Sirius, she'd have been sure on that point. "I should thank you for not actually stealing my wife away, I suppose."

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[info]_rebelrebel
2012-09-08 03:38 am UTC (link)
Sirius couldn't help but look up in surprise when James started laughing. He guess he should have expected to a certain extent that James would be glad that he was sleeping with other people -- but he figured it wasn't so much the physical act, but the emotional one that he was confessing to. He and Lily hadn't ever slept together. But he had been emotionally committed to her, and he'd felt like he was betraying her every time and did it anyway.

"We never slept together," Sirius said, and he sounded just about as sheepish as he got when he said it -- he didn't know if James knew for sure. He couldn't imagine Lily not reassuring him a thousand times that she and Sirius had never done anything more than sleep in the same bed and sometimes cuddle. But, maybe it would help to hear it said out loud from both of them.

"But what I was doing was still wrong," Sirius finally tacked on.

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[info]staghearted
2012-09-08 03:55 am UTC (link)
"I know," James said, very nearly bursting out laughing again at the look on Sirius's face. "Merlin, I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm laughing. It's just... how am I supposed to react to that, really? I'm not jealous, at any rate. All of this was supposed to be about me being jealous of you two, but I got over that in the first real conversation I had with her, really. Even before she believed me at all."

He'd never really been the jealous type. If anything, the most jealousy he'd felt through this whole ordeal was over Lily's friendship with Sirius, but only because it seemed to have come at the cost of his own. It was much more about fear of losing his friend than it was about being bothered by their actual relationship, and now that he was getting Sirius back, jealousy had all but vanished from the picture. Protectiveness still remained in full force, but that was something entirely different.

He attempted to compose himself again, running both hands over his face and then adjusting his glasses. "But, yeah," he said, more seriously. "Because she trusted you. I do get that." He tilted his head and looked at Sirius. "If it makes you feel any better, I didn't cheat on her."

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[info]_rebelrebel
2012-09-08 04:19 am UTC (link)
Sirius couldn't help but smile faintly. He knew that James wasn't belittling how he felt about the situation -- it was just that moments like these made him realize how out of touch he really was with reality. He knew that he and James were making good progress. But he knew that Rodolphus got under his skin and into his head too easily, and that he still too readily believed that lies that Rodolphus fed him. He had been afraid that James and Lily would hate him for what he'd done. Even now, with part of his confession out in the opening, he feared James' reaction to the second half. Because he thought the second half might hurt James' more than the first.

"Well that's because you're a better person than I am," Sirius readily quipped, but he couldn't meet James' gaze when he said it either, because it was something he had become absolutely certain of since arriving in the compound.

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[info]staghearted
2012-09-08 04:38 am UTC (link)
"No," James said, "It's because I'm in love with her, and you aren't. I understand why you feel guilty, but believe me, I'd feel a hell of a lot guiltier if I were the one who'd done that. She'd feel a hell of a lot worse than you do right now if she'd been the one who'd cheated. I know your marriage was real to you, and I'm not trying to say otherwise, but you never did actually choose to be faithful to her, or make any vow about it, not of your own free will. You know that, yeah?"

This was a touchy topic, he knew. The very first thing he'd argued with Lily over, once he'd realized she was actually his, was whether her marriage to Sirius was real or fake; he'd wanted to discount it for obvious reasons, but had come to understand the reality of it. It still wasn't something he liked thinking too hard about, but it wasn't about jealousy.

He watched Sirius silently for a moment. "Was that all you wanted to tell me?" He knew there was more than that, there had to be more than that to make Sirius this nervous. But as far as he was concerned, Sirius was allowed to keep secrets. He had already formed his own theories about what Sirius might be hiding, and he very highly doubted that anything his friend could say would genuinely surprise him.

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[info]_rebelrebel
2012-09-08 05:00 am UTC (link)
He knew it was hard to say what it was that existed between him and Lily -- what existed between him and James. He didn't need to look too hard at any of it right now. He didn't need to examine how real his marriage had been to Lily, or how it needed to be labeled. He loved Lily, and he loved James. That was enough for him for the time being. It was enough to get him through everything they had gone through.

Although that also didn't change the fact that he did think that James was a better man than he was. He didn't want to get into that though, didn't want to have to explain to James that his cheating and James' lack thereof might have not been the best example, because maybe it did stem from a true love sort of situation, but in the end, he was certain that James would have done everything differently. James would have fared a hell of a lot better than he had.

"No," Sirius answered when James pressed, and it took everything he had in him not to start tapping his hand against his knee. He turned his arm up; his sleeves were already rolled up, so the tattoos were visible even in the low lighting of the tunnel. "Rodolphus has a matching set of these. I designed them. They're intended to amplify dark magic." Sirius licked nervously at his lower lip. "I know a lot of dark magic now."

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[info]staghearted
2012-09-08 05:11 am UTC (link)
The point for James, really, was that what existed between Sirius and Lily wasn't the same thing as what was between him and Lily. That was why he wasn't jealous; that was why he didn't count any of it as problematic. What it all boiled down to was that their friendship didn't interfere with his relationship to her or to Sirius, nor did his relationship to either of them interfere with their friendship. Just the fact that Sirius was guilting himself over having cheated on Lily told him that much; it was a violation of her trust, but if it was violating an actual romantic relationship between them, there would have been an entirely different violation of trust to worry about.

Which was why James had laughed. His best mate, who wasn't in love with his wife, was concerned that he had cheated on her. At face value, that was utterly ridiculous. He knew it wasn't ridiculous on a real, emotional level, but he still couldn't help but shake his head at the whole thing. He shifted, uncrossing his legs to fold them in front of him, resting his arms on his knees as he listened.

Well, that secret was not even ridiculous at face value. He had been expecting something like this, though; his expression grew more serious, but registered no surprise. "I noticed," he said. "You tried to use an Unforgivable on me, remember?" He paused. "Did you learn the rest of it to use on me, too?"

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[info]_rebelrebel
2012-09-08 05:51 am UTC (link)
No laughter this time. And that came as no surprise, because there wasn't anything remotely amusing about this confession. He glanced back up at James, his throat feeling a little as he remembered how he'd tried to attack James when he'd first arrived -- and James had done practically nothing. Laughed, even though it hadn't been funny then and it wasn't funny now.

He nodded when James asked the question, because he didn't dare to answer out loud. He couldn't trust his voice. All he could hear was Rodolphus saying, that if they had only known the places his wand had been, the dark things he'd learned, they wouldn't think that he was so noble. And some part of him was utterly convinced that was the truth. He knew that even by telling James this, it wasn't really enough. Because James wouldn't understand unless Sirius laid out every spell he had read, and he wasn't prepared to do that. They all knew his family was bad on the surface, but even James had never seen them at their worst. He had never seen what his father had worked at keeping hidden in his library.

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[info]staghearted
2012-09-08 06:05 am UTC (link)
Despite himself, that answer almost made James smile, but he tried to suppress it. Maybe he'd cracked; maybe that was why he kept laughing at all the wrong times. Laughed when he'd been attacked, laughed when Sirius confessed to cheating on Lily. He wasn't laughing now, but he was... well, he hadn't really figured out what it was yet.

"So that's it?" he asked. "The tattoos, the dark magic, that's what Lestrange knows about you that I don't? That's what he thinks will scare me off? Well, he's the one that's delusional."

That was at least partly why he was amused, because that was just utterly laughable. Not the dark magic itself, but the fact that both of them thought James would be scared off that easily. Lestrange had called him delusional; Sirius seemed to think he was just too morally righteous to be able to accept any sort of dark side from him. James had underestimated what the Lestranges might do to Sirius and Lily, but he wasn't the only one who'd made that kind of mistake.

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[info]_rebelrebel
2012-09-08 06:13 am UTC (link)
"That's it?" Sirius echoed, and he couldn't help but sound incredulous. He ran a hand through his hair, belying his agitation. "James, what can you imagine that could possibly be any worse than this?" He asked, knowing full well that probably the only thing that could be worse than everything they had experienced was if they had died during it.

Other than that, Sirius was pretty sure that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. They all lost each other for close to two decades. James' son grew up without a mother. Sirius had lost close to five years worth of memories, considered Bellatrix an ally for more than that, and knew every single spell that he had once condoned his family for knowing -- and then continued to make a few of his own. He had lied to Lily, couldn't remember anything about Harry, and had attacked James.

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[info]staghearted
2012-09-08 06:29 am UTC (link)
"I can't imagine anything worse," James said honestly. "You've hit rock bottom, haven't you? You let yourself be pulled back into your family, the family that made you miserable, the family that wants to take everything good about you and twist it into something awful. You believed the worst about your real family, and turned on the people who love you unconditionally and accept you for who you are. You cheated on the one person who knew what you were going through and was there to protect you, this whole time."

He spoke passionately, leaning forward, but there was no condemnation in his tone. No anger, or hatred, or disgust, or pain. Just honesty, just insistence on making Sirius understand-- making him understand that he, James, understood. "And now you're hating yourself for all of it, right? You're afraid that you're like them, that I'll turn my back on you, because you know I'd never be friends with someone like Rodolphus Lestrange. But I'm still here," he said, voice softening on the last sentence. "I'm still here, because I know you, a million times better than Lestrange does. I've seen you at your best, and I've seen you at your worst, and everywhere in between. I'm seeing the very worst in you right now, in fact, and I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere."

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[info]_rebelrebel
2012-09-08 06:43 am UTC (link)
It was hard to hear everything splayed out in the open. He wanted to cringe away when James leaned forward, but he knew that there was nowhere for him to go. They were pressed tightly up against the walls of the tunnel, and short of actually leaving, there was no way that he could avoid James.

"I am them," Sirius half-whispered when James said he was afraid of being like them. And that was the truth of the matter. He had been foolish at sixteen to think that he could run from them. He couldn't. Because the darkest part of them was always inside him. And he could never escape that, no matter what he did. There was something implicitly rotted about him; there were plenty of people who could have walked into that library, read the same things he had seen, gained the same knowledge he had, and not made the same decisions. But he had a natural inclination toward it, a propensity that was foolish to ignore.

And that was the scariest part of all of it -- and that was what Rodolphus claimed time and time again, and it was always most difficult when he was speaking the truth: They had merely shown him what he had always the potential to be. There'd been little forcing on that spectrum. He'd walked through that door on his own, and Rodolphus was right; he never knew what was inside his head now, and what could come out to hurt James and Lily again.

He was never happier than when he was pretending things were normal with them. The night of drinking with James and Remus -- he'd finally felt sane again, comfortable in his own skin. But it was because he was pretending that those years hadn't happened, that he could just strike them out. And he couldn't do that, no matter how much he wanted to.

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[info]staghearted
2012-09-08 07:05 am UTC (link)
"No, you aren't," James said. "You're afraid that you are, but you aren't. The person you are chose to leave them behind, when you had your own free will. They kidnapped you, and tortured you, and turned almost all the love inside you into hate. It must have hurt like hell, thinking Remus and I had tried to kill you. I think that made you turn to them just because they were horrible, dark, twisted people, but at least you hadn't ever trusted them the way you trusted me. Because it's one thing when someone you dislike tries to kill you, it's another thing entirely when it's the people you trusted most in the world."

That was the difference, in James's mind, between Lily's reaction and Sirius's. Lily had simply forgotten every bit of trust between herself and James; Sirius remembered more than enough of it. Fear, torture, confusion; that had nothing on betrayal. And Sirius knew what it felt like to believe that James had killed him, he must think James felt the same way after Sirius had tried to kill him.

He didn't, though. Because his judgment hadn't been messed with, and he saw the whole picture. "You went down into the darkest part of yourself because you wanted to hurt me as much as I'd hurt you. Because the worst dark magic imaginable isn't even enough to hurt me that much, is it?" He gave Sirius a slight smile. "Well, that's really kind of flattering, honestly. Heartwarming, even. Because I would've felt a bit stupid going to the ends of the earth looking for someone who didn't care as much about me as I do about him."

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[info]_rebelrebel
2012-09-08 07:35 am UTC (link)
Sirius could feel the gnarl of emotion that sat tightly in his chest still. After awhile of being with Bellatrix and Rodolphus, everything had just been reduced to anger; he couldn't process anything about how he'd felt about James and Remus, because he'd just been too angry.

But if he tried to press himself, to remember far back enough, into the parts that started to bleed away, the bits that were still blurred -- he could remember that feeling of devastation. That feeling of being utterly wrecked, when Bellatrix had persisted at telling him that James and Remus were trying to hurt him. The memories were mostly frayed, and he knew now, it had to be because he never believed her. It had taken persistence and wrecking his head to get him just to cross over from desolation and into anger. And after that, he hadn't looked back -- or hadn't been allowed to look back. And so he'd done whatever he could -- or was allowed to do -- to cope with that terrible rage that had sat heavy on his chest all the time.

He felt overwhelmed by what James was telling him now -- he couldn't even recognize what he was feeling, much less begin to convey it. So instead, he merely leaned forward, and wrapped one arm around the back of James' shoulder, pulling him close. He shut his eyes and just held James for a moment, as if afraid he would suddenly disappear.

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[info]staghearted
2012-09-08 07:54 am UTC (link)
James was prepared to argue it further, if he had to; he was ready to be accused of being delusional or naive, because it was true he'd just made an attempt to kill him into a warm and fuzzy story. Lestrange most definitely would have called him delusional, but even if James was letting his belief in Sirius sway him, even if it was a little bit biased and a little bit a story to make them both feel better-- what made his story any less real than the one the Lestranges had told? He was by far the more reliable source.

But Sirius didn't argue, and that was how James knew he was right. He shifted, moved into the embrace. It was a bit awkward in the enclosed space, but he didn't care; he ended up leaning against Sirius, head resting against his best mate's shoulder, both arms around Sirius's waist.

This was why he wasn't running away. Because even when Sirius was at his lowest, when he was in the darkest place he'd ever been in, James still understood him. And that was important, because the understanding between them didn't come from any invasion of privacy or manipulation, and it wasn't guesswork. James had understood Sirius from the moment he'd met him on the train, because they were alike, and the things that Sirius had in common with James were the things that his horrid family couldn't take credit for. James didn't understand Rodolphus Lestrange, not in the same way, because they were nothing alike; as long as he still understood Sirius, it was absolute, conclusive proof that Sirius was not them. At least, it was all the proof that James needed.

He was silent for a long time, and then reached up and tousled Sirius's hair affectionately. "I knew you were going to try to kill me, you know, before you even got here," he said. "The other you, the one from baby world, he told me that was what he'd have done-- didn't even surprise me, really. And I figured the secret you were keeping was something like that, too. Can't put anything past me, Pads."

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[info]_rebelrebel
2012-09-09 12:36 am UTC (link)
Sirius shut his eyes for a moment when James hugged him back. He knew that he kept getting scared, and that he was probably going to keeping getting scared, but he also did believe what James and Remus had been telling him from the beginning -- that they would all get better. That, maybe, one day everything would be okay. It was still strange to think that he and Remus had a daughter of some sort together in the future, but it had, in an even stranger way, become some sort of good future to work toward.

There was no denying that it hurt to hear that James had expected him to kill him. It wasn't what he wanted to hear, even if it was the truth. And he also couldn't help but hear some quiet measure of dread, because James had done nothing -- because he was so utterly idiotic sometime.

"Love you, Jamie," Sirius murmured, pressing a kiss against James' temple. "No more secrets. I promise. Anything else he tells you is a lie."

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[info]staghearted
2012-09-09 01:47 am UTC (link)
James smiled, tightening his hold on Sirius's waist. He hadn't really been joking when he'd told Sirius that he required a lot of hugs and cuddles to keep him happy; he'd felt truly, utterly miserable with the distance between them ever since Sirius had shown up. Things were still hard, but they'd closed that gap.

And James was, for the most part, healed. His pain in this whole mess had been simplest to heal of all; he just wanted Sirius and Lily back, and now that they were, hardly anything else mattered. He still ached for them when they hurt, and got angry on their behalf, but he was alright. He could be here holding onto them until they were alright, too-- he could be solid, that was what Lily had called him.

"You're allowed to keep secrets, Sirius," he said. "It didn't matter that he knew that and I didn't, he still doesn't know you as well as I do. I don't give a shite what he says, because no matter how fucked things are, you're still my brother. And I trust you."

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