InsaneJournal

Lena felt sheepish, slinking up to Sirius’ office with her metaphorical tail between her legs, but there was a part of her that badly wanted something to believe in, and Sirius seemed to be offering it. She did want the tutoring, she did want the explanations and the answers and the comfort he kept saying he could offer, but so far she had been resisting because she’d been so determined not to trust him.

She needed to trust someone. Zee was amazing, but only five minutes older than she was. Lena needed something more.

“Go on then,” she mumbled awkwardly, leaning against the doorway. “Wow me.”

Sirius looked up from the fourth year essays he was grading, his eyes starting to go unfocused. So unfocused that he couldn't believe that he actually saw Lena Renaud standing in his office doorway. "You don't knock?" he asked, a teasing tone to his voice. But it reminded him of all the times he ended up barging into professors' offices himself one way or another. Sometimes when the professors weren't even there, when he was pranking them. Oh, to be 17 again, he thought.

He was more casual when tucked away in his office, his robes thrown over the back of a chair against the wall, his shirt collar open, tie off. He'd already removed his shoes. His wand sat on his desk. He lowered the quill in his hand to his desk and sat back, motioning for her to come in. "Do you want any tea? I can get a kettle on. Or," Sirius said, "we can get straight to it."

“You’re sitting right there. With the door open. You saw me coming,” Lena retorted. “If I’d knocked, you would have mocked me for being obvious. And this is exactly what I’m talking about with you. It’s always some smart ass remark. And you wonder why I don’t want to trust you.”

But she walked into the room and plopped into a chair, crossing her arms, symbolically protecting herself from anything and everything he might say. “Tea, yes please. Milk and two sugars.”

She wasn’t particularly interested in a practical lesson. She could ask Wilkes for that, and Black maybe later, but what she’d really come for today were answers. Conversation. Comfort, if he was capable of giving it. She was just so tired of being angry and on edge all the time.

"Heard you coming, actually," he said before stopping himself. "I have excellent hearing." Blame Padfoot, really, as being a dog animagus meant heightened senses elsewhere. Of course, it also meant problems back in Azkaban, but that was a different matter.

Sirius stood up and moved over to where he kept the meager supply of tea in his office on a small table against the wall. Along with the kettle and cups was a lopsided stack of books, some old issues of the Prophet, and a framed photograph of three boys with their arms around one another. If looked at closely, it'd be obvious to tell that a fourth boy had been snipped rather violently out of the photo.

With his back to her, he picked up the kettle and two cups and moved them over to his desk, where he would prepare their teas.. Then he picked up his wand and heated the water wordlessly. "You're always good for a smart ass remark yourself," he pointed out. "But I've been doing it longer. I'm afraid that not even Azkaban can scare the smart-ass out of me. My mother's probably still rolling in her grave over it."

He fixed her tea first just as she asked for it then his own, which took no milk or sugar at all, then returned sat, not behind his desk, but in a chair catty-corner to hers, holding his cup in both hands, his wand on his thigh. "I can't imagine that being a smart-ass is enough to warrant distrust, but I'll give you it for now." Sirius smiled at her. A smile, not a smirk.

Cupping her mug in both hands, Lena blew on it briefly then sipped cautiously. “Well, you make a passable cup of tea, so you can’t be all bad,” she said, looking up at him to see if he’d taken that remark for the actually lighthearted tease it had been.

“Look,” she went on, setting the cup on his desk. “I’m not a sneak. I want to make that clear. I could tell you tales about what goes on in these halls that would make your hair curl into actual ringlets, but I don’t, because I’m not a sneak. But you and the others keep banging on about how we ought to tell you about the bullying and the rest that’s going on, and that if we do, you’ll do something about it. So I’m going to tell you everything I know. And I’m hoping you’re going to keep your end of the bargain.”

"I'd hardly be a good Brit if I didn't know how to make a cup of tea," he returned.

He raised an eyebrow as she went on about what he might and might not know about what goes on in Hogwarts and he had to do everything in his power not to laugh. "Please, Miss Renaud," he said. "I guarantee you that nothing you could tell me about what goes on at Hogwarts would surprise me." After all, he had been a student here once, during the height of a war. Not to mention that between him and James, they did worse than a lot of what went on now. But telling her that wouldn't win him any favors, so he didn't elaborate.

"I can't imagine you came in here to tattle on your classmates," he continued after a moment. "I assure you that this staff takes incidents involving students very seriously, and matters are taken care of. If anyone has been bothering or threatening you, please let me know about it. However, if you're talking about Luna Lovegood and Mr. Nott, I believe Professor Vance already has the matter under investigation and I'm not going to step on her toes about it."

“I don’t know shit about tea,” Lena scoffed. “I’m Belgian. We don’t do tea the way Brits do. But this… it is about Nott. But not so much about Luna, because I dealt with that. I mean… I don’t know what Professor Vance is doing to Nott, but I at least managed to unstick Luna’s things, and replace the things that were damaged. No, I’m talking about the way Pansy Parkinson…”

She sighed. “Forget it. It’s only going to make me sound petty and small and there’s nothing you can do about it anyway, and just the thought of explaining it is making me exhausted.” She drank from the mug again. “Tell me something different. I don’t want to be a sneak. Tell me… tell me about you during the war. Tell me about war.”

Sirius started to say something about Miss Parkinson and her haughty ways but imagined it would come out with a very firm bias against Slytherins and even though he had one and always would, he was still a professor and probably shouldn't be continuing the cycle with a student who already had her own bias. So he didn't say anything. But, oh, how he wanted to.

"The war? The war was shite and it ruined hundreds of lives," he said flippantly, because her question had been so vague, the way she asked it. "Want to be a little more specific?" he asked.

“Just talk to me!” Lena exploded, horrified to find herself beginning to cry. “Pretend for just a short moment that you have feelings and that you can actually recognize them in others. Someone put my name on a list of people who are going to get killed. My sister’s name is on that list. My uncle’s name was on it and someone killed him! He’s dead!”

Furiously she wiped at her eyes, trying to stop the tears. It took her a moment but she did finally get herself under control. “I don’t know what to ask, because like you keep saying, we don’t know what it’s like. But you do. So instead of forcing me to play twenty questions, can you just… tell me something real?”

Oh fucking hell, he thought, she was going to cry. Crying teenage girls were not something he was very good at working with, especially given that his track record in school was making them cry. He tried not to pull a face so instead sipped his tea and frowned. "Most of my feelings were wiped clean of me while decaying in an Azkaban prison cell," he stated quietly. He didn't talk about this. Sure he could talk about it with Remus, but it was Remus. And he didn't talk about it with James, because James had been MIA in how many years. And Fabian, he understood, having had his own cell for years. But --

His face contorted a little bit, going from something smirky to something hard and cold, but only for a moment. Like a shadow had crossed his face and then disappeared. "I'm sorry about your uncle," he said after a moment. "The first loss is always the hardest. But I want you to know that so long as you're here, at Hogwarts, nothing is going to happen to you and your sister." He said this all in a stern, serious voice. "And nothing is going to happen to you after you finish in a few months either," he continued. "Not if I have anything to say about it."

Sirius knew that he and the Order were going to do everything in their power to make sure that these students stayed safe come June. They were not going to lose children this time around like they did last time around.

For the first time, he’d said something that rang true and for the first time, she felt respect for the man sitting in front of her. She didn’t smile, because the occasion didn’t call for it, but at least the anger was quickly draining out of her.

“You can’t promise that, sir,” she said quietly. “I know you mean well, but once we’re outside the walls… I mean if you started protecting every graduate, you’d have no time to teach.” She shrugged.

“What were you going to show me the other day? When I freaked out and told you not to touch me. Was it something about my shield?”

"No, I can't promise that, and I'm not going to patronize you by saying I can. The only person you can count on to one hundred percent protect yourself is yourself. Not your partner, not the DMLE, not your friends -- it's shite, I know, but it's fact." He paused to drink a steaming swallow, then another, of his tea.

What had he been trying to show her, he thought, frowning again momentarily. Then it came to him and he shook his head. "No, not about your shield. It was about your disarming spell. A better way to move your wand so you don't give away the spell before it's cast."

Truthfully, he was glad the subject moved away from Azkaban and the war. He wondered how long he could stave her off from that topic.

“Show me, then,” she offered. She stood, pulling her wand out of her skirt pocket. “I won’t… snap at you this time.”

Chilling and pessimistic as his words were, they were true, and she had nothing but respect for that, despite how long it had taken him to get to a place where he could be real and not just flippant and obnoxious. This Professor Black, this was a Professor Black Lena could respect. Maybe even like.

Sirius was more than a little surprised at that, but he set his tea cup aside and nodded. "All right," he said, move into your dueling position then. He stood as well, moving his own wand aside, and carefully reached out to straighten her wand.

"The disarming charm is a pretty powerful one," he said. "Like I said the other day, the best thing you can do is strip your opponent of his wand. Once it's gone, you have an advantage. You know the motion of the spell, but if you hold your wand arm steady and point with the end, like this --" He moved her arm to straighten it out, making both her arm and wand parallel to the floor. "-- you have a better range of subtle motion."

He stepped back away from her and held up his own wand. "Now do the spell again. Out loud, please, but make your spell movements with only your wrist, not your wand, and not your arm."

Lena flinched as he came closer, but it was reflex, not defiance, and compared to her reaction to his proximity the other day she may as well have crawled in his lap and smooched his cheek, the contrast was so stark. She submitted as he corrected her stance, her grip, and demonstrated what she could do better, then took a deep breath as me moved out of her personal space and readied himself for her to try it out.

“I’m sorry I tried to make you poop your pants in front of everyone,” she blurted. “Expelliarmus!”

Despite having no intention of protecting himself from the spell and instead letting her easily flick his wand out of his hand, her outburst caught him by surprise. At the same moment as her spell hit his wand and sent it clattering behind him, knocking over his picture frame, he let out a rumbling bark of a laugh.

"Well, I'm sure glad I managed to defend myself against that one then," he said, still chuckling. "It would have been pretty embarrassing to stand up in front of the class knowing that everyone had seen me shit myself." As someone who had used that hex before -- successfully, though not in any battles against Death Eaters -- he knew the amusement one could get out of it.

He turned to retrieve his wand.

Lena had immediately thrown up a nonverbal Protego as soon as the spell had left her wand, remembering the lesson she had learned the hard way during their duel, but when no counter attack was forthcoming she cautiously let it drop. “I did it,” she laughed. “I actually disarmed you!”

Her smile, when she flashed it at him, was bright and genuine, the truly dazzling one that she saved for moments of actual happiness. Merlin knew there hadn’t been much call for it lately. “Thank you, sir. That was brilliant.”

Sirius almost ruined the moment by telling her that he was going to let her disarm him regardless, but then thought better of it. Instead, with his wand back in hand and after righting the frame and straightening a book that he tumbled over, he nodded over at her.

"Well done, Miss Renaud. We don't have room for a proper duel, but I want you to try it again." This time he wouldn't make it so easy for him. "Remember, this spell is one an opponent will be looking for, so it's important to be subtle about it."

He readied himself and watched her carefully, despite the fact that in real life dueling situations, no one ever had this much time. Reflexes had to be honed. He knew that had he had more time to think about it in a lot of his own fighting situations, he would have acted differently. Sometimes he wondered if he'd have cast a different spell at Bellatrix that day in Gringott's, if he hadn't had to react impulsively.

She assumed the position, then cast the spell again, saying it aloud and concentrating on moving her wand as little as possible. Actually, with the work all in the wrist, she found she had much more control over her aim, and -- though it might be a bit premature to be thinking this -- she almost felt like she had more power in the spell because of it.

“Expelliarmus,” she said, once again immediately throwing up a nonverbal Protego. She wondered if he knew she was doing it, if she was giving that away too, but she didn’t like to ask.

This time, he deflected her disarming spell and it hit his teacup, shattering it. He ignored it. "Once again, please," he said carefully, again not retaliating with a spell of his own.

Steeling herself, Lena cast it a third time, shielded herself a third time, this time putting every ounce of power she could muster into the spell. She wanted badly for this to work, and not because he was humoring her or because she’d caught him off guard by babbling about poop. She wanted one real disarm -- or at least to be on the right track to get one, with a little practice.

She was getting better, Sirius thought, he'd give her that. But he still managed to deflect this one, more because of the tug he felt on his own wand and less because he anticipated it, even though he had instructed her to say it out loud. The spell hit a book behind him and it tumbled to the floor.

"Almost had me with that one," he said. "Next time we'll work on doing it nonverbally. I know you already have your shield charm down without saying it, but the disarming spell is hard to get right without saying it out loud." It was true. And what was truer still was gaining control of any spell nonverbally during a fight. "That's one of the hardest things to accomplish," he continued, turning to pick up the book (which had a bit of a singe mark on its cover; Remus would be aghast). "In a real fight. Nonverbals. You already have too much going on in your mind for your wand to distinguish what you want it to do and what else is going on."

He gave a flick of his wrist and the spilt tea disappeared and the teacup was put back together, looking as if it had never broken.

“You should really think about setting up some sort of boot camp,” Lena said, mostly joking. Then she realized what she had just said and her eyes widened. “Boot camp! Set it up over a weekend. Don’t use anything more dangerous than disarming spells and tickling charms, but booby trap an area of the castle or the grounds, and have the campers move through it, reacting to things as they go. How brilliant would that be, to test our reflexes in real time in a non-lethal sort of way?”

She sat back down to finish her tea, then stood, hovering awkwardly much the same way she had when she had first arrived. “So I, um… I’ll go. But shall I come back?”

It was a promising idea, and not all that much different than what he proposed to Remus and James. "I'll speak to Professor Lupin about it," he said. "After all, defense is his area of expertise, not mine." At least, officially. Though Sirius also knew that Remus could best him in a proper duel with his quiet concentration and powerful spellcasting.

Sirius watched her, amused, when she stood up. "Finish your tea, Miss Renaud." He pointed his wand at it to heat it up again. "And ask me again about the war."

“Tell me about the war, sir,” Lena prompted.