InsaneJournal

Who: Sirius Black and Zoe Renaud
What: Detention
Where: Sirius office, I’m assuming
When: February 23rd, Monday evening (slight backdating)
Warnings: None.

Zoe was self aware enough to acknowledge that she popped off at the mouth a bit to Black toward the end there, but he was getting snippy with her too. It didn’t mean she wasn’t annoyed about the detention, even though the detention was expected, and probably deserved. She already had mountains of detention because of the fight she had with Calliope - and at least it was Bones handling those detentions.

But it was probably a mess of emotions. Her professors were offended at the prospect of them not being entirely trustworthy, or all knowing, or whatever, and Zoe had gotten offended at the prospect that she still had to earn their respect, as if she’d never done anything to warrant it. Her professors. When somehow, apparently, Bones - not a professor - afforded her respect. If anything, he should respect her less; any fight she got into fell at his feet, not these Gryffindors.

But whatever. By the time she knocked on Black’s office door, she’d cooled down a bit, and was more sullen than anything. She was really meant to be the volatile twin, but as Lena got increasingly more volatile, Zoe had taken a back seat by extension. She’d turned into the calm twin during that time. But she couldn’t just be calm all the time - that was exhausting. Which was why she settled for sullen - not volatile and not calm.

Sirius looked up from his journal at the knock on the door. He closed it, stood up, and crossed the room to open it. He hadn't even remembered that he'd closed it. "Miss Renaud," he said with a lazy smile, stepping aside to let her in. "Come in." He had shrugged out of his robes and changed already, always eager to get comfortable after the day's lessons were complete. Muggle jeans and boots and a The Who t-shirt that was well-worn, one of the remnants from his younger years and probably something he shouldn't be wearing.

"Would you care for some tea?" he asked. Why did he always ask his students if they wanted tea? He didn't know. His office was untidy, as he hadn't cleaned it in a while, but he moved aside some essays and an odd-looking pincushion from one of the chairs across from his desk and motioned for her to sit.

Zoe had also changed out of her robes, into muggle jeans and a red fitted t-shirt. They were seventeen, but Zoe and Lena still stuck to the color scheme their mother had impose on them. For the most part; she still borrowed some blues when she didn’t feel like doing her own laundry. Even if they had magic.

Zoe entered his office, and took a seat as instructed. Offering her tea was probably the most British thing Black had ever done. Everybody here fancied tea, as if it were a crime against the Queen herself not to. But the shirt Black was wearing actually made Zoe smile. Such an old man. “Sure, I’ll have some tea,” she said, taking her seat as instructed. This was starting to look like a lecture detention more than a detention detention. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed, but having a conversation was probably the last thing she wanted to do right now. “Is this going to be a lecture I should make myself comfortable for?”

He flicked his wand at the kettle to heat it then picked up two mugs himself, handing her one that already had a tea bag in it before taking a seat, not behind his desk, but in a comfortable, cushiony chair catty-corner to her. "I don't do lectures all that well," Sirius admitted. "So unless you really want for manual labor and I can shove you off on cleaning some cages or organizing essays, I thought we could just talk."

Zoe supposed that all of those options didn’t sound like fun, especially organizing essays. She was terrible at both organizing and essays. So talking it was. She took the offered mug. “Okay,” she agreed. “What do you want to talk about?”

When the kettle hissed a moment later -- he was always impatient enough to heat water too quickly -- he levitated it over to fill both of their mugs. "That's up to you. You seemed like you weren't close to running out of things to talk about earlier today, so I'm offering you a chance to keep it up. If you don't want to take it, you can sit here in silence for an hour and watch me read my first years' essays."

Well there was one way to threaten a student into talking. Watching him read sounded painfully boring. She did have a mouth on her - she could talk forever, if she tried. “Look, I’m not going to apologize,” she said automatically. She’d done enough fake apologizing after the fight with Calliope. “I meant most of what I said, and I’m sure you meant most of what you said. But you’re punishing me for calling you a child, aren’t you?”

"I don't believe I said anything about wanting to hear an apology," he said with a quick of the corner of his mouth. It wasn't as though he wouldn't appreciate one, but he had spent years being told to apologize for this or that that he knew better than to force an apology out of someone. He wouldn't condescend to her about that.

"I gave you detention for being disrespectful, both to me and to Professor Lupin." Sirius held up a hand to keep her from interrupting him at that, which he suspected she probably wanted to do. "Argue with me all you want about that, but I served enough detentions for the same reason in my day to see disrespect when its offered. Are you entitled to your own opinion? Yes of course. Should you be forced to apologize when you don't mean it? No, of course not. Are you allowed to call people awful names or think awful thoughts about them? Also, yes. But just because you can do all of these things doesn't mean you're above the consequences."

If there was anyone better suited to talk to someone else about consequences, Sirius wasn't sure who it was. After all, it didn't matter that his cousin was a murdering, bigoted, crazy-pants with a thirst for the Cruciatus curse -- Sirius had killed her and been caught and he had lived with the consequences. Every single day he did. Choices that anyone made could bear consequences, both good and bad. Either way, they came.

"Now I know you're not always disrespectful. I know that in the last few months a lot of things have happened that have changed the way you look at things. And I know that you don't like to hear me or Professor Lupin or anyone tell you that you're seventeen and in school and thus should adhere to certain rules and such but the fact is, you are seventeen and you are at school and you do need to be respectful and follow the rules and play nice, whether you think you should or not. Because here at Hogwarts, in that case, it doesn't matter what you think you should do or say. That's the worst part of it all, I know it is. Even though you don't want to think about it, I was seventeen once and believe me, I was a right arse. I spent more evenings in detention than evenings without. So I know a thing or two about how this all works." Fuck, he thought, he'd turned it into a lecture anyway, without even meaning to.

He paused and waved his hand a bit, as if nudging aside the monologue. "Look, Zoe, you have a few more months here and then you've got to get out of here and into the rest of the world where things aren't as safe as they are here. So my question to you is, do you want to spend the next four months railing against anyone who thinks differently than you or tries to tell you not to say something, or do you want to get ready for whatever hell life throws at you?" Now that wasn't exactly fair either, Sirius realized, to infer that life after Hogwarts would be hell. It was just so damned hard sometimes to think of life after school as anything but, considering he'd been out barely two years when he got locked up in a cell for the next decade.

Sirius was terrible at lectures, but that turned into a lecture pretty quickly. Zoe wasn’t even sure if she could blame him - adults seemed to like lecturing, because they were old, and they’d experienced things, so they knew a thing or two they felt the need to lecture kids about. If she’d tried to apologize, it wouldn’t have been honest, because she was sorry, she didn’t regret it. But she was seventeen, she wasn’t a kid anymore. She knew she’d been disrespectful for the most part, even when that disrespect felt warranted.

Zoe wasn’t a problem child so much in a way that immediately affected her professors. Sometimes she got side tracked or distracted in class, but she wasn’t the sort to blatantly disrespect her professors for the hell of it. Of course - she was a problem child in the way that it immediately affected certain students, and Bones. She was used to hearing lectures. But since Sirius had suggested she read up on him, she’d dug up a lot of other prophets from the war, she’d tried to read nearly everything published about it, in that time, knowing it was smarter to take a bit of grain of salt with it. The prophet probably hadn’t ever been impartial in their reporting - barely anything was.

So it’d be a dick move to dismiss the lecture, given who it was coming from. “Okay,” she said, taking a moment to digest the lecture. “That was a lecture,” she said, the upturning of the corners of her mouth making it sound more like a joke than a smartass comment. “But I am seventeen, I know things have consequences. After my uncle died, it wasn’t like I was picking fights every day just because my emotions validated it. I wasn’t picking fights with you and Lupin because a lot of things had happened. Somebody looking like me was, but it wasn’t me. I mean, I’m not saying I play by the rules either.” Because that’d be more than just a bit of a stretch. “But I’ve been trying to play nice. There’s a bit of a learning curve there. It gets difficult.”

He knew it had been a lecture so he let her smartass comment slide. Instead, he nodded. "And it'll just get more difficult, I hate to say it. Because believe me, things are easy for you, for all of you, here at Hogwarts these days. I said the same thing to your sister that I'll say to you now: I wish things would remain easy for you, too."

This wasn’t so much a reprimand as it was preparing Zoe for life after Hogwarts. A life full of kissing ass and biting her tongue. “They’re not entirely easy for every student here, professor,” Zoe said. “I mean, I know none of us got stuck in Azkaban, so that’s kinda a hard bar to pass. But we’ve got a muggle in Slytherin who I watched get his arse kicked for the first two years I was on the quidditch team, by his own team, and we’ve got Luna, who half the school thinks is bonkers and doesn’t make an effort to hide that. She’s the most optimistic person I’ve ever met, and we’ve got her acting like other students sticking her books to the corridor floor is just a game they’re playing with her. We’ve also got a notable section of our school calling my sister a lesbian bint. Not to mention our mum walked out on us ten years ago, because magic makes us freaks, and gone off to start a new family of her own. A new family that she formally updates us on the status of every holiday. Sends us pictures and letters about it every Christmas, like a spiteful lunatic.” Zoe managed to add in that last bit as emotionless as the rest that came before it, as if her mum was a problem of the family’s - not hers.

“And on most days, pulling out my own teeth with pliers is easier for me than writing some of the essays we have to write here. Doing coursework is already a personal hell for me. I get that the castle is a safe haven, and impenetrable but just putting us inside of it doesn’t make our lives easy. We kind of still exist outside of it, and have lives that Hogwarts can’t protect us from. We’re safe here, but life is a bit bigger than what’s safe and what’s not.”

"I never said anything about it being easy," Sirius said dryly. Because, hell, if life were easy, wouldn't it be pretty boring? "I'm sorry about your family. I know a little bit about batshit crazy mothers and everything, so I get it. My point isn't --" He stopped, suddenly, because he didn't want to make that point. In fact, he didn't want to sit here and argue with insufferable teenage girls who didn't want to listen to much of anything.

"Look, forget it, Renaud, right? You're right. Of course you're right. Your life is the worst and being at Hogwarts doesn't change it. But if you think a little name calling and books being charmed stuck to the floor is too much to handle, then good luck when you get out of here." He reached to the side to pick up an essay and, as he brought it toward him, sipped his hot tea.

Why yes, Sirius Black was an asshole, in case you were wondering. He often wondered why Minerva thought he'd make even a halfway decent professor.

Zoe watched Sirius obviously disagree with her, because that seemed to be what he did now. God forbid he actually listen and agree with some of the merit of what she had to say. But she was a teenager, so clearly what she had to say was little more than her whining about her sad, pathetic life. Except, Zoe wasn’t a whiner. And the way he cut himself off to throw that back in her face annoyed the hell out of her. Especially when he seriously did just tell her that they all had it easy at Hogwarts and he wished it could stay easy for them.

What a dick.

“I think six years of total and complete isolation is too much to handle,” Zoe snapped, sitting up in her chair. “You’re being condescending and dismissing what some of the kids here are going through just because you’ve been through worse. What’d you expect to get out of this talk? You expect to tell me my actions have consequences like I’m a five year old who doesn’t quite get that yet - when I’m already on forever detention because of one bloody fight - or did you expect to tell me that things are easier now but they’re gonna get loads harder so I might as well enjoy what I’ve got now - like all I do is exist to stir the pot and cause waves. I don’t. I haven’t been. I was damn near zen like when my uncle died. I’m not exploding, I’m not behaving like an emotional teenager, so why are you treating me like one?”

By the very fact that she asked why he was treating her like an emotional teenager told him that's exactly how she was acting. "I'm not actually treating you -- or any student here -- any differently than I would anyone else," Sirius said. Up to her if she believed him or not. "But here's the thing, Renaud, you're railing and ranting about not being told anything when you're not asking questions. I'm not a mind reader. None of the professors are. Assuming we won't answer your questions and going off about it is being an emotional person. I seem to recall that I've announced to everyone a few weeks back that I'm here to answer anything anyone wants. Just because you don't like the answer doesn't mean I'm keeping things from you."

“I wasn’t railing and ranting about any of that, I’ve moved on to other things to rail and rant about,” Zoe said dismissively. “But I have asked you questions. I’m the other Renaud twin, remember? I’m not the one fighting you about answers you haven’t given me because I haven’t asked the questions. I’ve asked Bones questions too, when all of this started, and he told me that there are some things you just can’t tell your students, but he’ll try to tell me everything he can. But it doesn’t matter, because you’re not a death eater. Whatever you got from your experiences, you’re putting it into the defense lessons with Lupin. You don’t have the answers we want, you don’t know any more than we do. I made one comment about our professors assuring us it’s not a war when everything else is telling us the opposite. Because whether or not you’re doing it to prevent hysteria, or to put us at ease, if this does turn out to be a war, all those false comforts will be resented, no matter what your intent is, because that’s time we lost when we could’ve been mentally preparing ourselves for war. Keeping yourself in the dark for as long as possible is stupid. But again, it doesn’t matter dude, because I made one comment, and I moved on. I’m not in a constant state of emotions because of that one comment. I’ll be alright. Do you wanna talk about why you personally feel slighted by that one comment, professor? To get your emotions out?” Zoe took a sip of her tea, and then leaned back in the chair.

Yes, he rolled his eyes at her final comment. "The war was eleven years long," he snapped, then cleared his throat. "This is nothing. Do I think it's going to get anywhere near as bad as it was last time? No. Why? Because this isn't You-Know-Who. This is old men who can't let go of the past and some crazy woman with delusions of grandeur." Sirius took a moment and raced a hand back through his hair. "I wouldn't hold much stock in what the Prophet reports or what words they choose. They've been sensationalizing the truth for centuries."

At least that was some honest emotions, even if he did snap at her. Teachers tried so hard to remain emotionally neutral about things, probably because seeing them freak out would actually make the students freak out. But seeing them not express any kind of emotion about it did make them look a bit like Gods - removed from the issues - and perhaps that wasn’t the best thing right now. “Yeah, I figured. After you told me to read up on you, I read up on the entire war, which was a lot of reading. Before, it took them years of reporting casualties before they admitted they were at war. This time it took them three months, which is sketchy at best.”

"Exactly," he said, with a curt nod. "It means they don't know what the hell they're talking about." Sirius understood the necessity for a newspaper, but a newspaper ought to report to news and none of this shite it was spewing that was editorial and half-true at best. "One thing to remember is that it's been months since any of those lists popped up, and, with the unfortunate exception of your uncle who, I believe, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, we're all still alive. If this was a war, and if Lady Noir and whoever supports her was serious, we'd be dead."

“Joséphine Savage didn’t seem to think it was happenstance that he was there,” Zoe said. “You’re right, I’m a child who doesn’t know what’s really going on, and I find it hard to believe anybody does yet. But you’re doing him a great dishonor by chalking his death up to happenstance. I think it’s foolish and arrogant of you to propose that the both of them being on a list, and them both working toward illustrating the good of the muggleborn, and them both being attacked by men using the killing curse just happened because of wrong place, wrong time. Savage said that five people died giving their lives to a war we’d all thought we’d won. The prophet is shite for news, and incredibly bias, but it’s not like all of us outside of the media can agree on whether this is a war or not. My uncle died last month, not ten years ago. The French Consulate was attacked, a death eater was killed and a trial for a death eater was interrupted by men wearing death eater masks. And you’re giving us extra dueling lessons, all the while telling us to calm down, this isn’t a war. If it looks like a duck, professor, we’re gonna start listening to the duck to see if it quacks like one too. That’s all this is. We’re just listening to the thing that looks like a duck.”

Sirius listened to her, thinking throughout her diatribe that she was wrong and she didn't have all the facts and she didn't even care. And that made him not care. He blamed the waning months before the end of the term, really. He blamed the fact that being a professor was wearing thin on his nerves and he didn't like it as much as he did. If it weren't for Remus ...

He was through. "Well, I think that's enough for the evening, Renaud," he said. "It's clear to me that you've already formed every opinion you want to have and since you're a bit like me, you're not too interested in changing those opinions. You may go."

Maybe if Sirius was willing to give them all the facts, she’d have more to go on. She understood that they were removed from the world, stuck up in the castle as they were, but from her side of things - it logically did look to be heading toward war, or at least, some seriously severe times. But wasn’t those severe times just as trying as war? Didn’t every life matter and leave their impact with their deaths, especially if those deaths were caused by the same men who’d turned themselves into death eaters for a meglomaniac?

“I’m not a bit like you, professor,” Zoe said, rising to her feet. She seat the empty tea cup down on his desk. “I haven’t written you off yet just because you don’t care to listen to me. Good talk.” But he’d dismissed her, which meant they didn’t have argue in circles anymore, neither of them wanting to entertain what the other had to say, so she went for his door, so she could get back to her life, and the rest of her detentions.