Normally, they would meet at the pub after Doe’s shift and Sirius would walk home with her or she would come over to his place and they would spend a long night pretending that they weren’t actually attempting to bother his roommate. Today was not a normal day. That day, Sirius had been forced to face his own mortality. He had once liked to think of himself as invincible, back when he was young and impossibly stupid. Over the years a lot had changed, but the fact of the matter was that Sirius had been consistently dealt a bad hand over the course of his life. He’d had a streak of luck that ran the length of his Hogwarts years, and after that? His luck ran dry. He’d lost nearly all of his friends to war and he’d been wrongly imprisoned. Now, he found out the truth about his future and how little of it there was left. When one sat back and tried to think seven years into the future it seemed impossible. Fathomless. Seven years seemed like a long time when you were just trying to imagine where you might be. When you knew that seven years was all you had…it seemed so short. Just a blip or a blink, and it would never be enough time.
The result of all his bad times, however, had made him fairly decent at coping. He liked to ignorer things. Just a little while. When it sank in for good, that was when he’d be real about it. That was the moment that he would accept it. Until then, he wanted to do something normal. Most of his friends had big responsibilities. They were all married with children or jobs that had them up early in the morning. They had to be adults that everyone looked up to. Sirius, however, did not. He could be immature and no one blinked twice about it usually. In the face of all the ways that his friends had changed, Sirius quite liked spending time with Dorcas because she was still familiar. He didn’t have to re-learn her the way that he had to navigate his other friends. She didn’t coddle him. She just drank and danced and talked with him about all the little nothings that were so distracting he could just put his problems on a shelf for a little while. She made him laugh, and so few people could manage that these days. She never tip-toed around him, and it was so damn refreshing.
So, that night instead of meeting at the pub, he was going directly to her house. He had already had a few drinks, even though he probably shouldn’t have. He didn’t dare risk changing into Padfoot to run quickly over to her house no matter how tempting, because drunk self-transfiguration really was an atrocious idea. He made his way there, though, with a history book and his journal tucked under his arm. He was still wearing the same jeans, t-shirt, and button up from earlier, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The chains of a few necklaces that fell to his chest were still the same, as were the adornments on his wrists, but he felt somehow irrevocably shifted. He knocked on the door in a familiar pattern and then let himself in without further preamble. He walked in and did his best to plaster a convincing smile on his lips. He dropped the offending books onto the coffee table with an unceremonious thump, “Doe, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see your glorious face. Is that AC/DC?”