Flash Photography and Stills (1/3, unfinished)
Flash Photography and Stills (1/3)
Harry Potter, PG
Summary: Winter term, seventh year, Sirius Black discovered Muggle photography. And things quickly spiralled downwards from there, or perhaps upwards, depending on who you asked.
This is dedicated to Lana and Deanna, who made it not only possible, but also readable, and for whom there are not enough 'thank-yous.'
1. 1971 F2 Photomic
Sixth year, Peter came back to school with photographs from his trip to France in an album in his trunk, safely tucked away between the flimsy plastic pages. James and Sirius stared at them for five minutes, fascinated by the fact that they were in bright, sharp colour, until James pronounced them entirely too boring because no one moved and it wasn’t as if they hadn’t seen Peter thoroughly drenched before; they wanted to see him actually falling into the river.
Peter explained that the pictures weren’t supposed to move, seeing as to how they’d been taken by his father with his trusty Yashica as his family bicycled around one of the many rivers of the French Riviera. He went on to say that you weren’t supposed to move while the photograph was being taken because then it would be all blurry and you’d have to toss it out, and it was a waste of money, developing blurry photos.
James was utterly horrified by the prospect of photographs that were truly still while Remus didn’t have much to say either way, used as he was to juggling Muggle and Wizard contraptions because of his mixed parentage. Sirius said the only pictures he’d ever seen of completely still people were those of his grandparents, whose corpses had been photographed for his family’s albums shortly after their deaths two years ago. He did concede, though, that his grandparents hadn’t looked nearly as happy in their photographs as Peter and his parents did, so maybe there was something to be said for Muggle photography, when done the right way.
Remus quipped that yes, he might be onto something, seeing as to how it was probably the only way to actually get Sirius to stay still for more than two minutes at a time.
“Ha bloody ha, Lupin -- I’ll have you know I can be perfectly well-behaved if I need to be,” Sirius retorted, but he didn’t get to elaborate further, forced as he was to avenge his dignity after James coughed with suspicious loudness.
Peter’s photographs did not finish making the obligatory round of the dormitory because neither James nor Sirius could bring themselves to look at them for any length of time, certainly not for Peter’s sake. It was only later that night, as the two boys wrote eighteen inches on the relevance of Io and Ganymede on their lives (an assignment they’d had the whole summer to do), that Remus, his own assignments long completed, asked to see the album again. This earned him snide commentary as well as mock glares and shudders that degenerated into a pillow fight, as things inevitably did whenever Sirius and James could not be bothered to do their work.
They didn’t talk about Muggle photography again for over a year, simply because the subject never came up.
-
On Boxing Day, 1977, Sirius crawled out of the little hole he called his flat having mostly recovered from his mandatory Christmas Eve hangover, only to nearly knock his neighbour over. She was carrying two large plastic bags in one hand, securing with the other a large cardboard box haphazardly balanced on top of her head, and had presumably stopped right in front of Sirius’ door to take a break during her steep descent down the building’s narrow stairwell.
A somewhat waifish girl, she let the bags slip out of her hand unceremoniously and then put the box on the ground with an exaggerated sigh, glancing predatorily at Sirius all the while, hardly subtle at all. “Do you think you could help me with these? They’re rather heavy...”
“Are you tossing all this out?” he asked in return, surveying the contents of the box.
“Well, you know, Christmas. All the gift-wrap and whatnot, there’s really little else to do with it once you’ve torn it getting at the presents. The same’s for the boxes, too.”
Sirius nodded absently. “Is this a camera?” he asked, when a something that looked vaguely like a black leather brick caught his eye.
“Uh-huh. My parents gave me a new one -- this one’s good, sure, it was a great model back in the day, but I’ve had it for, what, five years now? And there’s this new brilliant model out, brand new, so I got that this year. Not that the F2 one isn’t a good camera, but the new F2SB is a lot better...”
“Ah,” he said, not paying close attention to her speech, eyes still on the camera. “Right.”
She smiled at him seductively. “You know, it still works -- if you want it, it’s a fantastic camera. I think I’ve still got the manual somewhere, I can find it and you can come get it later... You can have it, really, for helping me with all this.”
Decidedly not ensnared by his neighbour’s feminine charms, Sirius kept on staring at the camera, all varnished metal and black leatherette, tantalizing buttons and swivels, remembering Peter’s trip to France and the strange photographs he’d taken there. Still figures, trees that didn’t sway in the breeze and rivers that didn’t flow… suddenly they didn’t seem quite as frightening as before.
“I’d rather you have it than toss it out, you know...” she trailed off, twirling a strand of wispy blond hair between her fingers.
“Right, then,” he said, flashing her one of his own grins. “I’ll keep it,” he finally decided, and proceeded to rescue the camera from the chaotic mass of wrapping paper and ribbons that were threatening to spill out of the box.
Sirius returned to Hogwarts for the winter term of his seventh year with a somewhat battered 1971 Nikon F2 Photomic in his trunk, safely wedged between his unwritten Advanced Potions essay and his second Gryffindor scarf.
He never did go grab the manual.
-
Quickly forgotten, the camera languished inside Sirius’ trunk the first two weeks of the term, until an unfortunate encounter with Snape and his wand prompted a strategic retreat back to the dormitory in search of a shirt that was neither particularly dirty nor covered in Stinksap and a full vial of Zonko’s Ivy Supreme powder. As he frantically dug through his belongings with one hand - the other desperately attempting to scratch the spot between his shoulder blades where the powder was pooling, obviously to spite him - Sirius’ fingers brushed the cold metal of the F2 and he froze, suddenly remembering how he’d ended up with a Muggle camera in his trunk.
“Hey, Pete, you busy?” he called as he shrugged off the offending shirt and put a marginally cleaner one on. Normally he would have asked Remus, but things were still slightly awkward between the two of them, after sixth year. Besides, it’d been the memory of Peter and his photographs that had driven him to accept the camera in the first place, and he figured that Peter would best know what to do next.
“Need to finish this Transfiguration essay...” Peter muttered without looking up.
“I’ve something to show you,” Sirius announced triumphantly in his best ‘shiny new toy’ voice.
Peter immediately stopped writing, resting his quill in his inkwell. “What’s it?” he asked, sauntering towards Sirius’ trunk.
“Look.” Sirius grinned, and with a flourish produced the camera, tugging it free from the tangled nest of scarves and robes it had somehow worked itself into.
Peter stared wordlessly at Sirius for a few seconds, clearly impressed. “Where did you get this?” he asked once he finally recovered his voice.
“My neighbour back home,” Sirius said proudly, pushing the camera into Peter’s lap. “She was tossing it, said she’d got a better one over the hols. Told me to keep it.”
Peter accepted the camera and turned it over in his hands, inspecting it with as much thoroughness as his limited experience allowed.
“You’ve got to teach me how to use it,” Sirius added vehemently, eyes sparkling.
“Right,” came Peter’s doubtful reply.
“Oh, come off it, Pete - you know more than I do about it, anyhow. So tell me.”
Peter swallowed, nervously. “Muggle photography,” he explained to a very attentive Sirius, “is very different from Wizarding. The camera’s sort of the same, but you know how when you take a picture of someone, it takes two or three seconds, and it doesn’t matter if you’re moving ‘cos you’re going to move anyhow, inside the photograph?” Sirius nodded and Peter continued, watching a bemused Remus from the corner of his eye. “Muggle cameras have a shutter too, but it closes a lot faster, less than a second, I think. I’m not too sure how it works -- my dad tried to explain it to me but it didn’t stick -- it’s something to do with photons and the speed of light. But at any rate, it’s a lot faster,” he finished somewhat lamely.
Sirius kept his unblinking eyes on Peter, looking at the shorter boy with far more enthusiasm than was called for by the situation. “Where do the pictures come out?”
“Eh... you have to develop the roll...” Peter answered, his concentration beginning to waver under Sirius’ relentless gaze.
“Roll?”
Peter took a deep breath, noticing how Remus was now watching them with barely disguised amusement over the edge of his Arithmancy textbook. “It’s, uh... when you take a picture, the image doesn’t go straight into paper, it goes into this little roll you have to buy separately.” Sirius’ face fell at the mention of extra parts. He hadn’t thought of that, apparently. “The camera’s got film inside it, and when the shutter opens the image goes onto it. It’s called a negative, and once you’re done with the roll you wind it, send it to a laboratory and they develop the pictures for you.”
Sirius stared at him, somewhat at a loss and clearly distraught by the prospect of having a useless camera on his hands.
“You know, I can write to my mum,” Peter offered generously. “Ask her to send a couple of rolls, and then I can show you what it’s all about. She can send them next time she sends me a package, and then I’ll show you how to load it. When you’re done with the roll we can send it to her for developing.”
“Right, then! Thanks a lot, mate,” Sirius said as he rose, laying one casual hand on Peter’s shoulder. As he returned the camera to the trunk and slammed the lid shut he turned once more. “Say, what’s a photon?”
From the bed, Remus clearly smirked. Peter groaned and settled for “I’m not quite sure.”
-
Peter did indeed write to his mother, and she did indeed write back, enclosing in a tightly wrapped parcel a roll of film and a note saying that when they needed it developed, they should simply send it back and she’d take care of everything.
The day Peter’s owl swooped down the Gryffindor table during breakfast, clutching in its talons the first batch of photographs, Sirius tore into the envelope with frightening viciousness. He gave a delighted little yelp upon seeing that the prints were really in colour, and started passing them around the table.
“Sirius, mate, what’s that supposed to be?” asked James as he squinted at a particularly blurry one.
Glancing at the photograph in question, Sirius managed to sound crestfallen and amused at the same time. “I... don’t know.”
“Looks like the Forest to me...” said Peter, screwing his eyes and attempting to appease his owl, who was clearly daring him to just try and make him fly all the way from London with another roll of developed photographs tied to its talons. “…if you squint and look at it this way...”
James craned his neck, imitating Peter’s pose. “Yeah, I can see it.... That’s the tree where we found that Bowtruckle last week, innit?”
“Sure looks like it.”
“Eh... I haven’t taken any photographs of the Forest,” Sirius muttered, brow creased.
“You haven’t?” James sounded genuinely surprised.
“Just the Quidditch pitch, mostly. And...” he dropped his tone. “And a couple of sunsets.”
James’ laughter was loud and raucous. “Bloody hell, Sirius, you’re turning into a girl!”
“Oh, shut up, Potter!” Sirius hissed, eyes sweeping up and down the breakfast table to make sure no one had taken James’ commentary to heart. It was one thing to be a sodding bastard or a bloody git, and he was fine with that, but being called a girl, especially in public, was simply not on. Satisfied that no one thought him any less manly, even as he possessively clutched the developed roll in his hands, he returned his attention to the photographs, and then frowned as he eyed a rather unfortunate shot of the castle, as seen from the Quidditch pitch. “And it’s not as if any of the pictures turned out good anyhow.”
“So long as you weren’t planning to write love-stricken poetry afterwards....”
“I’m not the one hopelessly infatuated with Evans.”
“I think she’s starting to like me,” James grinned triumphantly.
“You’ve been saying that for the last seven years.”
“Yes, but this time, I mean it.”
Sirius, Peter and Remus - who’d remained quiet throughout the exchange - all rolled their eyes.
-
After three rolls of over-exposed negatives, blurry photographs and dubious subject choice, Sirius proved himself, beyond any doubt, to be a horrible photographer. Half of this they could blame on his eagerness to play with every dial on the camera with utter disregard to consequences, the other half on his vehement unwillingness to actually point the camera at people. When questioned about the latter he usually replied with either a non-committal shrug or some throwaway comment about how his real talent didn’t lie in portraits but in landscapes; the different responses were dependent on who was doing the questioning. The truth, though, was very simple - Sirius found the motionless prints of people too unnerving, still too similar to those of his dead grandparents, and so he turned his lens to anything from icicles to the sunset, neither of which particularly suited his character.
After the fifth roll and a few flash sightings, word spread among the girls of Gryffindor tower that Sirius Black had taken to photographing things Muggle style. And either because they were too deeply enthralled by the combination of Sirius’ name and looks or out of a grotesquely misshapen appreciation for bad minimalist photography, said girls took to sighing loudly or shamelessly posing, and every variation in-between, whenever the Marauders walked through the school, in hopes of attracting Sirius’ attention.
At first, Sirius found this slightly puzzling, until he made the connection between the heavily made-up girls prowling the common room with their top button carefully undone and the F2 hanging around his neck. Once clued in, he started to abuse the image of the amateur photographer as much as he abused most other things to do with girls; which was to say, not as much as he technically could have. He grinned his perfect grin and smiled shamelessly every once in a while, but despite making no move to dispel rumours of his search for the perfect model, he certainly refrained from fuelling them.
His friends thought of it as simply the latest in a long list of idiosyncrasies, something to do with being inbred and a Pureblood; meanwhile most Gryffindor girls - and somewhat more subtly, the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff ones, too, and even the occasional Slytherin - swooned at the thought of having handsome Sirius Black, heir to Lots of Money, waste roll upon roll of film on them.
Sirius, though, remained stubborn in his decision to not point his camera at anyone. He resolutely stuck to the Quidditch pitch, the castle itself, and, once most of the snow had melted away, extreme close-ups on blades of grass.
Despite the obvious ill fit between Sirius and his subject matters, not one of his friends suggested he turn his lens elsewhere, -- they already knew it was virtually impossible to talk Sirius out of anything. Hopefully the phase would pass before he discovered how to reliably control both shutter speed and focus; there was no doubt among the remaining Marauders that Padfoot’s already atrocious attempts at modern art would, if nothing else, become even more prolific if he ever found out how to actually work the camera.
Remus would have been the ideal candidate to pull him aside and, with a pat on the back, say ‘congratulations, you’ve finally found something you’re absolute shit at. How does it feel?’ Now that they were actually speaking to one another again, Sirius had developed a slightly alarming tendency to listen to the other boy’s every word. But with N.E.W.T.S. looming in the horizon, Remus had better things to be doing than attempting to talk Sirius Black out of his latest obsession.
-
Sometime between the twentieth and thirtieth roll, Peter’s mother, who’d obviously looked at some of Sirius’ prints, sent a roll of black-and-white film with a well-intentioned note that read ‘I do think you may find that monochrome will suit your artistic pursuits better than colour photography could ever hope to. What better time for experimenting than school, besides?’
Sirius, who felt the only saving grace of Muggle photographs was the fact that they were really in colour, as opposed to the not-so-vibrant hues of their Wizarding counterparts, didn’t think too highly of this idea, but the day came when he simply had no other rolls left. Without much enthusiasm he loaded the black-and-white one into the camera, one rainy afternoon in the Common Room, and after advancing the first few frames and casually muttering Impervio over his robes, he set off yet again towards the Quidditch pitch.
A couple of weeks later, Peter’s mother sent them the latest batch of developed photographs and some new rolls, along with socks for Peter. As they made the mandatory breakfast round, Remus was rather surprised to find that he was actually the subject of one of the pictures.
Remus raised this with Sirius later that evening in the dormitory. “You took a picture of me,” he said simply, the coldness that had laced his words for the better part of the last year replaced instead by genuine curiosity.
“I didn’t mean to,” Sirius hurriedly replied, flipping through prints and pulling out the one in question. “I’d just loaded the roll and needed to get the first few exposures out of the way - Peter keeps on saying how it’s best to do that - and you were in the room studying. I didn’t think they’d turn out, they never do.”
“I don’t mind. Just surprised, that’s all.”
Sirius relaxed visibly. “Oh, good,” he said. “It’s... weird, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“The photograph. 'Cos you’re still and everything, not moving. Looks wrong. Reminds me of home,” he added after a moment’s hesitation.
“I’m used to them. Our house is full of pictures of me, my mum really likes them.”
“Does she?” he asked without lifting his head, eyes still focused on the photograph of Remus’ back. “I don’t,” he said resolutely.
“No?”
“No. And, I mean, it’s all good when it’s the pitch but it’s getting dull, I’m getting tired of it. That, and I reckon I’m not too good a photographer, even if you bastards won’t tell it to my face.”
“No,” Remus answered with the beginnings of a genuine smile, the first in a long time. “You aren’t.”
Sirius smiled back.
-
Sirius’ interest in photography declined steeply thereafter. Peter’s mother received a note thanking her very much for all her kindness over the past two months, but no more rolls were required, Sirius reckoned he had enough to last for the rest of the year, and he would certainly pay her for everything when they met at King’s Cross come June. The F2 returned to the trunk, without ceremony, once again wedged between dirty socks and a couple of textbooks.
It was one Sunday, early into spring, that Remus found Sirius sitting in bed surrounded by piles of photographs he appeared to be sorting according to his unfathomable logic. “What are you doing?” he asked, watching as Sirius ruthlessly tore through an envelope of prints, barely glancing at each photograph before dropping it into one of the many available piles.
“Tossing these out. They’re utter shit, anyhow, it’s no great loss,” the other boy replied cheerfully, looking up. “And I need to make space in my trunk for the books we’re lifting from the Restricted Section.”
“You’re stealing books?” Remus blurted out, sounding rather appalled.
“Only a couple. We’ve got to go out with a bang and it’s not like we aren’t giving them back once we’re done.”
“And when were you thinking about telling me about this?”
“Well, we’re still in the early stages of... research.”
“You know,” he mused, more to the room than to Sirius, “I’d have thought being Head Boy would have taught James something about responsibility.”
Sirius shrugged, returning his attention to the photographs scattered over his unmade bed. “Why? Didn’t work for you, did it?”
Remus didn’t reply, turning to his own trunk in search of his Charms textbook instead. He sat on his bed and read, the peaceful silence only broken by the occasional flipping of pages or Sirius tearing a photograph into many tiny pieces.
“Oh.” Sirius spoke suddenly, squinting at the photograph at his hands. “It’s that one I took of you, when Pete’s mum sent the black-and-white stuff. If you want it,” he offered by way of explanation when Remus looked up from his book, “you can have it. It’s not as if it’s good or anything, but...” he trailed off.
Remus thought of the photograph, a shot of his back as he sat hobbled over one of the tables in the common room, presumably reading some textbook or another. It was, he had to admit, one of the better pictures Sirius had produced - not that that was saying much.
“Nah. Thanks, though.”
Sirius’ expression shifted so little that it was almost imperceptible, and because Remus was not looking at him, he missed it.
“Why don’t you keep it?” Remus asked without raising his eyes from his book. “It’s not that bad....”
“Why, thanks. I still think it’s weird, though, how you’re not moving. Don’t like it.”
“Fair enough,” he replied, and Sirius brusquely tore the photograph into fourths, dropping the pieces on top of the growing pile of rejected prints.
By the end of the afternoon, most of the many envelopes’ worth of prints had met the same fate, save for a handful of exceptionally rare and decent photographs. The product of fortuitous combinations of diaphragm, shutter, and aperture settings, these found themselves taped all over Sirius’ bedposts, in some sort of final tribute to his lack of skills.
-
It was a terrible spring that year, cold and wet, all rain and mud and a lake that constantly threatened to overflow. They’d thought it fun at first, until the fifth detention for tracking mud inside the castle, and the soft March rain that refused to ease up as April went by and became May.
“Sodding rain. I’m bored,” Sirius complained loudly, shifting yet again atop his bed and knocking a couple of textbooks over in the process. “Where’s James, anyhow?”
“Quidditch. Match on Saturday,” Remus said. “He was saying something about Darnley having ‘obviously sold himself to the Slytherins because he expects us to practice in this hellish rain’”
“What, they’re going to have to play in this weather?”
“You’re the one who said last month’s match should go on despite the hail...”
“Yes, but that was Slytherin,” Sirius replied, making dismissive motions, as if it should have been obvious to Remus that the circumstances were vastly different.
In reply, Remus raised an eyebrow and returned to his book. Sirius grumbled, a constant murmur against the hail pelting the windows, and searched for ways in which to entertain himself.
“What do they look like?” he asked after a while.
“Who?”
“The characters in your books.”
Remus closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m not quite sure. I don’t really... see them, when I read.”
Sirius cocked his head to one side, inquisitive like a dog. “Oh. Why?”
“I don’t know why, I simply don’t. I know what they look like, but I can’t see it. I’m not watching a movie when I read.”
“Then what do you see?”
“Nothing. I just read the words, it’s enough.”
Sirius shrugged non-committally from his own bed. “If you say so.”
Remus returned to his reading again, and was surprised to find his mattress suddenly sag as Sirius carelessly dropped down beside him. Sirius stared at him for a few seconds, then plucked the book out of his hands, flipping through the pages disrespectfully.
“So,” Sirius asked as he scanned the book, “if I ask you what this... Napoleon fella looks like, can you tell me?”
“He’s a pig, Sirius,” Remus replied.
Sirius stared at him, not quite comprehending. “A pig? Filthier than James, you mean?”
“No. A pig. An animal,” Remus said again, a mild note of annoyance in his tone.
“You’re having me on, Lupin,” he said, and then, when Remus didn’t volunteer any more information, “A pig? A pig pig?” Sirius sounded genuinely distressed that Remus would rather read about pigs than amuse him. “What the hell are you reading, anyhow?”
Remus attempted to snatch the book back, but Sirius was clenching it too tightly. “Animal Farm. It’s a Muggle book.”
“Well, yes. Only Muggles would write about pigs.”
“It’s actually rather good.”
Sirius looked at him in that way that clearly meant ‘you’re off your rocker.’ “It can’t be. It’s about pigs.”
“It’s not about pigs, Sirius.”
“There’s a pig on the cover,” he said resolutely, turning the book over.
Remus sighed, and tried to think of how to explain socialism and George Orwell to Sirius in less than five sentences and in a way that would prevent any further questions - he just wanted to finish his book, damn it. “Look. I don’t know how to explain it. But when I read there’s no picture, no photograph. I just don’t think about the characters like that.”
“That makes no sense,” Sirius said with finality, leaning closer. “How can you read a book and not know what the characters look like?”
“I know what they look like,” he said, trying hard not to snap at Sirius. “I just... can’t describe them. It doesn’t work like that,” he trailed off, fingers rubbing the bridge of his nose again.
“But you say you don’t see them when you read,” Sirius nearly wailed, honestly puzzled. “So how can you know what they look like?”
“Look, Sirius. If I tell you that Regulus is in Slytherin and he’s good at Arithmancy and Charms but terrible at Herbology, you get an idea of the sort of person he is, right? It’s the same when I read a book - with what the characters do, you get an idea of who they are, and also of what they look like...”
“Right,” Sirius said after a moment of silence, and gave the book back, still unconvinced. “Sometimes you make no sense, Moony.”
Things would have made more sense if Sirius had gotten up and returned to his bed after that, but instead he pulled up his long legs and stared fixedly at Remus again as the other boy resumed his reading. Staying still for a while, he then gingerly reached out a hand to put on Remus’ shoulder, only to let it drop back down halfway there.
“What now?” Remus asked as he felt the air shift.
“’s nothing,” Sirius replied somewhat sourly, and returned to his bed, sliding the thick drapes shut behind him with more force than necessary.
Remus stared after him, not quite sure what to make of this latest show of temper.
-
If Remus thought Sirius’ behaviour odd at first, he soon learned to get used to it. It wasn’t anything he could put a name to, or anything particularly intrusive; it was just… Sirius occasionally not-quite laying a hand on his shoulder, or Sirius occasionally being overly generous (not that he wasn’t already jumping at every opportunity to squander his inheritance). His friends thought it a new facet of the still-penitent Sirius, who was prone to sudden attacks of guilt and moral decency, and even if they found it somewhat unsettling, they did not think it particularly detrimental to his character.
And really, he wasn’t being that different; he’d been inquisitive and nosy and loud, and he was all of those things still. And he certainly hadn’t stopped punching James -- or any of them, for that matter -- in the arm whenever he got bored and they were within striking distance. But there was something new in the way he was always first to the infirmary, or in how he would actually pay attention in class and take good notes on the days Remus was forced to miss, offering them to him hesitantly, as if he were still fearing some rejection.
So when Sirius asked “You reckon he’s asleep?” when it was just him and James awake in their compartment of the Express, going back home for the final time, it only took James a few seconds to work out who his friend was referring to.
“Yeah,” James answered absently. “Knackered, I’d imagine. After the last two nights... Peter too.”
Sirius grinned; they’d thought of abandoning their plans for a stupendous final prank when Remus pointed out that their last night in the castle would be a full moon, but instead they’d decided to simply carry it out one day earlier. It cost Gryffindor the house cup, granted, but that was nothing when compared to the satisfaction of watching people’s reactions as they were met with the Marauder’s final, and, no longer facing the risk of expulsion, most daring example of creative rule-breaking. Then they’d spent all of last night running through the Forbidden Forest. It was somehow a fitting end to their seven years of mischief.
With another hesitant glance in Remus’ direction, and some nervous swallowing, Sirius spoke again, awkwardly. “I need to talk to you.”
James looked up from Quidditch Weekly. “What, now?”
“No, sodding next year!” Sirius hissed, trying not to wake up the other two boys. “Of course now.”
“All right,” James said, letting the magazine rest in his lap.
“All right then,” Sirius repeated, then fell silent, unwilling to meet James’ somewhat irked gaze.
“Well?”
“I think I like him,” Sirius whispered quickly, maybe under the delusion that if he said the words fast enough, made them blend into one another, they wouldn’t mean what he dreaded they did. “That is,” he continued after James stared at him blankly. “I like him. I think. Moony.”
James sputtered, whether with indignation or just surprise it was impossible to tell. “Oh,” he managed after a while. “Oh.”
James stared at Sirius a few more seconds - clearly too many seconds, because it prompted Sirius to snap, “Well, quit staring at me like I’m some sort of freak, now, Potter! You’d think you’d never heard about Dillon and Boot doing some marauding of their own in school.”
James blinked, trying to work out how Ravenclaw’s Seeker and Keeper were in any way related to Sirius suddenly deciding he fancied Remus. “Oh,” he said again, when it all fell into place. “Oh.”
“Oh I cannot believe this!” exploded Sirius. “You didn’t know. The two best looking 6th year girls snogging each other behind the Quidditch pitch, half the boys wanking off to them every night and you didn’t know! Where the hell were you hiding, Potter? And then I tell you I think I may be a poof and you stare at me and all you can say is sodding ‘oh,’ like you’re that two-year old cousin of yours I had to put up with last time I visited your parents. Sodding hell, Potter, next time I need advice I’m going to have to ask your girlfri-”
“You’re lucky Moony’s a damned heavy sleeper,” James interrupted.
Sirius shut up mid-word and paled considerably. And amazingly rapidly too. His eyes darted around the compartment, falling in quick succession over the spot Lily had vacated shortly before they began their conversation, claiming that she needed to go to the lav, then over Peter’s decidedly uncomfortable, slumbering form and finally resting on Remus, who was wincing every time the train bumped or swerved too vigorously. Much to Sirius’ relief, though, he still appeared to be fully asleep.
The ensuing silence was broken by Lily’s return. “Who were you yelling about?” she asked as she entered. “I could hear you all the way down the end of the car.”
“Sirius,” James said.
“Sirius?”
“Sirius is having an identity crisis,” James supplied. “I mean, it’s not like it’s the worst thing you could be doing, fancying blokes,” he turned back to Sirius, “but, hell, mate, you could have picked a better time to tell me. Not, you know, now.”
Sirius glared at him darkly as Lily asked “You fancy boys?” in a rather high-pitched voice. “No, really, you do?”
Sirius did not reply, just continued to stare menacingly at James.
“I hadn’t noticed,” Lily commented lamely after neither boy offered to answer her question. “You know, it’s rather pretty outside. And think, it’s the last time we’ll ever see this. I wish I had some photographs of it to show my parents,” she sighed wistfully. “Whatever happened to your camera, Sirius?”
“My camera?” he spoke at last, shaking himself out of his sulk. “In the trunk, I suppose. But I reckon a couple of the books we used for the last prank must’ve done something to it; I don’t remember it smelling of Stinksap.”
“Oh, pity,” Lily said, and after a while, “That could just be your socks, you know.”
“Funny, Evans,” he replied, and reached across the compartment to swat at her with half a heart.
-
When they got to King’s Cross, Sirius ambled over to the Potters and paid his respects, with James torn between eyeing him queerly and pretending to be horrified as his mother insisted that he come spend the summer with them. Sirius excused himself quickly, as Peter’s mother was waiting for him on the other side of the platform. In her purse she was carrying a list of every single expense she’d incurred in the past six months on behalf of a certain Sirius Black, although the fact that it was fully itemized was not so much for her sake as for his. Boys, she adamantly believed, needed to learn how to manage money just as much as girls did. If it were up to her, she’d keep them in school a couple more years, if only in the hopes that someone would teach them something about responsibility and housekeeping so she wouldn’t find herself washing Peter’s clothing when he turned 25.
“Hi, Mum,” said Peter meekly while hugging her awkwardly, Sirius and Remus watching bemusedly a few paces away. “Mum, you remember Sirius, right?”
“Of course I do,” she said and beamed at the three boys. “I dare say the people at the photography store remember him just as much.”
Sirius grinned at her in a distinctly flirtatious manner, and Remus fought the urge to shove an elbow into his groin. He could swear he saw the beginnings of a blush creep up Peter’s mother’s cheeks. She rummaged around her bag energetically, until she produced what appeared to be three or four sheets of paper stapled together at the top left-hand corner.
“Here,” she said, in a very businesslike tone. “I sorted them all out so you can check through it all and make sure everything is there. It’s all listed by date, so you can see how much I spent every trip, and down here’s the total. If you have any questions, just owl me - but not through Peter, because he will undoubtedly forget to tell me,” she finished, looking at her son in a mildly disapproving way.
Sirius took the proffered paper and disconcertedly stared at the number, having obviously forgotten all he’d ever known about pounds and pence. Remus, noticing the lost expression on his face, looked down at the parchment and did some quick maths in his head. “It comes out to 30 Galleons,” he said. “But I think I fumbled the pound-sickle conversion, so it could be less.”
None of them knew how much money Sirius had inherited, but judging by how lightly he spent, it was either an inconceivable amount or about to run out. He’d always had money, and apparently he was under the impression that he always would, somehow. “30 it is, then,” he smiled again, and rummaged around his robes in search of coins.
Just as he was done counting them, three more people emerged from the barrier to platform 9 ¾. Sirius must have seen Regulus and his parents out of the corner of his eye, even if he gave no outward sign of it, because just as they walked by, he leaned forward and kissed Peter’s mother on the cheek, certainly for longer than common courtesy dictated.
“Thanks,” he told her with a smile as he dropped the coins into her outstretched palm, eyes shining mischievously. “You’ve really been a great help - it won’t be trouble, converting these to Muggle money?”
This time left no room for doubt. Peter’s mother flushed for a few seconds, but recovered her composure soon enough to manage a “Not at all, my dear,” that didn’t sound quivering in the least.
Later, after Peter and his mother had vanished into the Tube, James and Lily stared at Sirius disbelievingly as Remus finished retelling what he’d just done. “You,” Remus told him, while poking him on the chest as they made their way outside the station, “are utterly shameless.”
“I mean, really, she’s got to be McGonagall’s age,” added James with a shudder.
Sirius grinned, utterly shameless as charged, and shoved the fully itemized list of photographic expenses into a pocket from where it would fall out twenty minutes later, never to be thought of again.
---
narie, 02.07.2004, Chicago, São Paulo, Chicago and São Paulo again.
Harry Potter, PG
Summary: Winter term, seventh year, Sirius Black discovered Muggle photography. And things quickly spiralled downwards from there, or perhaps upwards, depending on who you asked.
This is dedicated to Lana and Deanna, who made it not only possible, but also readable, and for whom there are not enough 'thank-yous.'
1. 1971 F2 Photomic
Sixth year, Peter came back to school with photographs from his trip to France in an album in his trunk, safely tucked away between the flimsy plastic pages. James and Sirius stared at them for five minutes, fascinated by the fact that they were in bright, sharp colour, until James pronounced them entirely too boring because no one moved and it wasn’t as if they hadn’t seen Peter thoroughly drenched before; they wanted to see him actually falling into the river.
Peter explained that the pictures weren’t supposed to move, seeing as to how they’d been taken by his father with his trusty Yashica as his family bicycled around one of the many rivers of the French Riviera. He went on to say that you weren’t supposed to move while the photograph was being taken because then it would be all blurry and you’d have to toss it out, and it was a waste of money, developing blurry photos.
James was utterly horrified by the prospect of photographs that were truly still while Remus didn’t have much to say either way, used as he was to juggling Muggle and Wizard contraptions because of his mixed parentage. Sirius said the only pictures he’d ever seen of completely still people were those of his grandparents, whose corpses had been photographed for his family’s albums shortly after their deaths two years ago. He did concede, though, that his grandparents hadn’t looked nearly as happy in their photographs as Peter and his parents did, so maybe there was something to be said for Muggle photography, when done the right way.
Remus quipped that yes, he might be onto something, seeing as to how it was probably the only way to actually get Sirius to stay still for more than two minutes at a time.
“Ha bloody ha, Lupin -- I’ll have you know I can be perfectly well-behaved if I need to be,” Sirius retorted, but he didn’t get to elaborate further, forced as he was to avenge his dignity after James coughed with suspicious loudness.
Peter’s photographs did not finish making the obligatory round of the dormitory because neither James nor Sirius could bring themselves to look at them for any length of time, certainly not for Peter’s sake. It was only later that night, as the two boys wrote eighteen inches on the relevance of Io and Ganymede on their lives (an assignment they’d had the whole summer to do), that Remus, his own assignments long completed, asked to see the album again. This earned him snide commentary as well as mock glares and shudders that degenerated into a pillow fight, as things inevitably did whenever Sirius and James could not be bothered to do their work.
They didn’t talk about Muggle photography again for over a year, simply because the subject never came up.
-
On Boxing Day, 1977, Sirius crawled out of the little hole he called his flat having mostly recovered from his mandatory Christmas Eve hangover, only to nearly knock his neighbour over. She was carrying two large plastic bags in one hand, securing with the other a large cardboard box haphazardly balanced on top of her head, and had presumably stopped right in front of Sirius’ door to take a break during her steep descent down the building’s narrow stairwell.
A somewhat waifish girl, she let the bags slip out of her hand unceremoniously and then put the box on the ground with an exaggerated sigh, glancing predatorily at Sirius all the while, hardly subtle at all. “Do you think you could help me with these? They’re rather heavy...”
“Are you tossing all this out?” he asked in return, surveying the contents of the box.
“Well, you know, Christmas. All the gift-wrap and whatnot, there’s really little else to do with it once you’ve torn it getting at the presents. The same’s for the boxes, too.”
Sirius nodded absently. “Is this a camera?” he asked, when a something that looked vaguely like a black leather brick caught his eye.
“Uh-huh. My parents gave me a new one -- this one’s good, sure, it was a great model back in the day, but I’ve had it for, what, five years now? And there’s this new brilliant model out, brand new, so I got that this year. Not that the F2 one isn’t a good camera, but the new F2SB is a lot better...”
“Ah,” he said, not paying close attention to her speech, eyes still on the camera. “Right.”
She smiled at him seductively. “You know, it still works -- if you want it, it’s a fantastic camera. I think I’ve still got the manual somewhere, I can find it and you can come get it later... You can have it, really, for helping me with all this.”
Decidedly not ensnared by his neighbour’s feminine charms, Sirius kept on staring at the camera, all varnished metal and black leatherette, tantalizing buttons and swivels, remembering Peter’s trip to France and the strange photographs he’d taken there. Still figures, trees that didn’t sway in the breeze and rivers that didn’t flow… suddenly they didn’t seem quite as frightening as before.
“I’d rather you have it than toss it out, you know...” she trailed off, twirling a strand of wispy blond hair between her fingers.
“Right, then,” he said, flashing her one of his own grins. “I’ll keep it,” he finally decided, and proceeded to rescue the camera from the chaotic mass of wrapping paper and ribbons that were threatening to spill out of the box.
Sirius returned to Hogwarts for the winter term of his seventh year with a somewhat battered 1971 Nikon F2 Photomic in his trunk, safely wedged between his unwritten Advanced Potions essay and his second Gryffindor scarf.
He never did go grab the manual.
-
Quickly forgotten, the camera languished inside Sirius’ trunk the first two weeks of the term, until an unfortunate encounter with Snape and his wand prompted a strategic retreat back to the dormitory in search of a shirt that was neither particularly dirty nor covered in Stinksap and a full vial of Zonko’s Ivy Supreme powder. As he frantically dug through his belongings with one hand - the other desperately attempting to scratch the spot between his shoulder blades where the powder was pooling, obviously to spite him - Sirius’ fingers brushed the cold metal of the F2 and he froze, suddenly remembering how he’d ended up with a Muggle camera in his trunk.
“Hey, Pete, you busy?” he called as he shrugged off the offending shirt and put a marginally cleaner one on. Normally he would have asked Remus, but things were still slightly awkward between the two of them, after sixth year. Besides, it’d been the memory of Peter and his photographs that had driven him to accept the camera in the first place, and he figured that Peter would best know what to do next.
“Need to finish this Transfiguration essay...” Peter muttered without looking up.
“I’ve something to show you,” Sirius announced triumphantly in his best ‘shiny new toy’ voice.
Peter immediately stopped writing, resting his quill in his inkwell. “What’s it?” he asked, sauntering towards Sirius’ trunk.
“Look.” Sirius grinned, and with a flourish produced the camera, tugging it free from the tangled nest of scarves and robes it had somehow worked itself into.
Peter stared wordlessly at Sirius for a few seconds, clearly impressed. “Where did you get this?” he asked once he finally recovered his voice.
“My neighbour back home,” Sirius said proudly, pushing the camera into Peter’s lap. “She was tossing it, said she’d got a better one over the hols. Told me to keep it.”
Peter accepted the camera and turned it over in his hands, inspecting it with as much thoroughness as his limited experience allowed.
“You’ve got to teach me how to use it,” Sirius added vehemently, eyes sparkling.
“Right,” came Peter’s doubtful reply.
“Oh, come off it, Pete - you know more than I do about it, anyhow. So tell me.”
Peter swallowed, nervously. “Muggle photography,” he explained to a very attentive Sirius, “is very different from Wizarding. The camera’s sort of the same, but you know how when you take a picture of someone, it takes two or three seconds, and it doesn’t matter if you’re moving ‘cos you’re going to move anyhow, inside the photograph?” Sirius nodded and Peter continued, watching a bemused Remus from the corner of his eye. “Muggle cameras have a shutter too, but it closes a lot faster, less than a second, I think. I’m not too sure how it works -- my dad tried to explain it to me but it didn’t stick -- it’s something to do with photons and the speed of light. But at any rate, it’s a lot faster,” he finished somewhat lamely.
Sirius kept his unblinking eyes on Peter, looking at the shorter boy with far more enthusiasm than was called for by the situation. “Where do the pictures come out?”
“Eh... you have to develop the roll...” Peter answered, his concentration beginning to waver under Sirius’ relentless gaze.
“Roll?”
Peter took a deep breath, noticing how Remus was now watching them with barely disguised amusement over the edge of his Arithmancy textbook. “It’s, uh... when you take a picture, the image doesn’t go straight into paper, it goes into this little roll you have to buy separately.” Sirius’ face fell at the mention of extra parts. He hadn’t thought of that, apparently. “The camera’s got film inside it, and when the shutter opens the image goes onto it. It’s called a negative, and once you’re done with the roll you wind it, send it to a laboratory and they develop the pictures for you.”
Sirius stared at him, somewhat at a loss and clearly distraught by the prospect of having a useless camera on his hands.
“You know, I can write to my mum,” Peter offered generously. “Ask her to send a couple of rolls, and then I can show you what it’s all about. She can send them next time she sends me a package, and then I’ll show you how to load it. When you’re done with the roll we can send it to her for developing.”
“Right, then! Thanks a lot, mate,” Sirius said as he rose, laying one casual hand on Peter’s shoulder. As he returned the camera to the trunk and slammed the lid shut he turned once more. “Say, what’s a photon?”
From the bed, Remus clearly smirked. Peter groaned and settled for “I’m not quite sure.”
-
Peter did indeed write to his mother, and she did indeed write back, enclosing in a tightly wrapped parcel a roll of film and a note saying that when they needed it developed, they should simply send it back and she’d take care of everything.
The day Peter’s owl swooped down the Gryffindor table during breakfast, clutching in its talons the first batch of photographs, Sirius tore into the envelope with frightening viciousness. He gave a delighted little yelp upon seeing that the prints were really in colour, and started passing them around the table.
“Sirius, mate, what’s that supposed to be?” asked James as he squinted at a particularly blurry one.
Glancing at the photograph in question, Sirius managed to sound crestfallen and amused at the same time. “I... don’t know.”
“Looks like the Forest to me...” said Peter, screwing his eyes and attempting to appease his owl, who was clearly daring him to just try and make him fly all the way from London with another roll of developed photographs tied to its talons. “…if you squint and look at it this way...”
James craned his neck, imitating Peter’s pose. “Yeah, I can see it.... That’s the tree where we found that Bowtruckle last week, innit?”
“Sure looks like it.”
“Eh... I haven’t taken any photographs of the Forest,” Sirius muttered, brow creased.
“You haven’t?” James sounded genuinely surprised.
“Just the Quidditch pitch, mostly. And...” he dropped his tone. “And a couple of sunsets.”
James’ laughter was loud and raucous. “Bloody hell, Sirius, you’re turning into a girl!”
“Oh, shut up, Potter!” Sirius hissed, eyes sweeping up and down the breakfast table to make sure no one had taken James’ commentary to heart. It was one thing to be a sodding bastard or a bloody git, and he was fine with that, but being called a girl, especially in public, was simply not on. Satisfied that no one thought him any less manly, even as he possessively clutched the developed roll in his hands, he returned his attention to the photographs, and then frowned as he eyed a rather unfortunate shot of the castle, as seen from the Quidditch pitch. “And it’s not as if any of the pictures turned out good anyhow.”
“So long as you weren’t planning to write love-stricken poetry afterwards....”
“I’m not the one hopelessly infatuated with Evans.”
“I think she’s starting to like me,” James grinned triumphantly.
“You’ve been saying that for the last seven years.”
“Yes, but this time, I mean it.”
Sirius, Peter and Remus - who’d remained quiet throughout the exchange - all rolled their eyes.
-
After three rolls of over-exposed negatives, blurry photographs and dubious subject choice, Sirius proved himself, beyond any doubt, to be a horrible photographer. Half of this they could blame on his eagerness to play with every dial on the camera with utter disregard to consequences, the other half on his vehement unwillingness to actually point the camera at people. When questioned about the latter he usually replied with either a non-committal shrug or some throwaway comment about how his real talent didn’t lie in portraits but in landscapes; the different responses were dependent on who was doing the questioning. The truth, though, was very simple - Sirius found the motionless prints of people too unnerving, still too similar to those of his dead grandparents, and so he turned his lens to anything from icicles to the sunset, neither of which particularly suited his character.
After the fifth roll and a few flash sightings, word spread among the girls of Gryffindor tower that Sirius Black had taken to photographing things Muggle style. And either because they were too deeply enthralled by the combination of Sirius’ name and looks or out of a grotesquely misshapen appreciation for bad minimalist photography, said girls took to sighing loudly or shamelessly posing, and every variation in-between, whenever the Marauders walked through the school, in hopes of attracting Sirius’ attention.
At first, Sirius found this slightly puzzling, until he made the connection between the heavily made-up girls prowling the common room with their top button carefully undone and the F2 hanging around his neck. Once clued in, he started to abuse the image of the amateur photographer as much as he abused most other things to do with girls; which was to say, not as much as he technically could have. He grinned his perfect grin and smiled shamelessly every once in a while, but despite making no move to dispel rumours of his search for the perfect model, he certainly refrained from fuelling them.
His friends thought of it as simply the latest in a long list of idiosyncrasies, something to do with being inbred and a Pureblood; meanwhile most Gryffindor girls - and somewhat more subtly, the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff ones, too, and even the occasional Slytherin - swooned at the thought of having handsome Sirius Black, heir to Lots of Money, waste roll upon roll of film on them.
Sirius, though, remained stubborn in his decision to not point his camera at anyone. He resolutely stuck to the Quidditch pitch, the castle itself, and, once most of the snow had melted away, extreme close-ups on blades of grass.
Despite the obvious ill fit between Sirius and his subject matters, not one of his friends suggested he turn his lens elsewhere, -- they already knew it was virtually impossible to talk Sirius out of anything. Hopefully the phase would pass before he discovered how to reliably control both shutter speed and focus; there was no doubt among the remaining Marauders that Padfoot’s already atrocious attempts at modern art would, if nothing else, become even more prolific if he ever found out how to actually work the camera.
Remus would have been the ideal candidate to pull him aside and, with a pat on the back, say ‘congratulations, you’ve finally found something you’re absolute shit at. How does it feel?’ Now that they were actually speaking to one another again, Sirius had developed a slightly alarming tendency to listen to the other boy’s every word. But with N.E.W.T.S. looming in the horizon, Remus had better things to be doing than attempting to talk Sirius Black out of his latest obsession.
-
Sometime between the twentieth and thirtieth roll, Peter’s mother, who’d obviously looked at some of Sirius’ prints, sent a roll of black-and-white film with a well-intentioned note that read ‘I do think you may find that monochrome will suit your artistic pursuits better than colour photography could ever hope to. What better time for experimenting than school, besides?’
Sirius, who felt the only saving grace of Muggle photographs was the fact that they were really in colour, as opposed to the not-so-vibrant hues of their Wizarding counterparts, didn’t think too highly of this idea, but the day came when he simply had no other rolls left. Without much enthusiasm he loaded the black-and-white one into the camera, one rainy afternoon in the Common Room, and after advancing the first few frames and casually muttering Impervio over his robes, he set off yet again towards the Quidditch pitch.
A couple of weeks later, Peter’s mother sent them the latest batch of developed photographs and some new rolls, along with socks for Peter. As they made the mandatory breakfast round, Remus was rather surprised to find that he was actually the subject of one of the pictures.
Remus raised this with Sirius later that evening in the dormitory. “You took a picture of me,” he said simply, the coldness that had laced his words for the better part of the last year replaced instead by genuine curiosity.
“I didn’t mean to,” Sirius hurriedly replied, flipping through prints and pulling out the one in question. “I’d just loaded the roll and needed to get the first few exposures out of the way - Peter keeps on saying how it’s best to do that - and you were in the room studying. I didn’t think they’d turn out, they never do.”
“I don’t mind. Just surprised, that’s all.”
Sirius relaxed visibly. “Oh, good,” he said. “It’s... weird, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“The photograph. 'Cos you’re still and everything, not moving. Looks wrong. Reminds me of home,” he added after a moment’s hesitation.
“I’m used to them. Our house is full of pictures of me, my mum really likes them.”
“Does she?” he asked without lifting his head, eyes still focused on the photograph of Remus’ back. “I don’t,” he said resolutely.
“No?”
“No. And, I mean, it’s all good when it’s the pitch but it’s getting dull, I’m getting tired of it. That, and I reckon I’m not too good a photographer, even if you bastards won’t tell it to my face.”
“No,” Remus answered with the beginnings of a genuine smile, the first in a long time. “You aren’t.”
Sirius smiled back.
-
Sirius’ interest in photography declined steeply thereafter. Peter’s mother received a note thanking her very much for all her kindness over the past two months, but no more rolls were required, Sirius reckoned he had enough to last for the rest of the year, and he would certainly pay her for everything when they met at King’s Cross come June. The F2 returned to the trunk, without ceremony, once again wedged between dirty socks and a couple of textbooks.
It was one Sunday, early into spring, that Remus found Sirius sitting in bed surrounded by piles of photographs he appeared to be sorting according to his unfathomable logic. “What are you doing?” he asked, watching as Sirius ruthlessly tore through an envelope of prints, barely glancing at each photograph before dropping it into one of the many available piles.
“Tossing these out. They’re utter shit, anyhow, it’s no great loss,” the other boy replied cheerfully, looking up. “And I need to make space in my trunk for the books we’re lifting from the Restricted Section.”
“You’re stealing books?” Remus blurted out, sounding rather appalled.
“Only a couple. We’ve got to go out with a bang and it’s not like we aren’t giving them back once we’re done.”
“And when were you thinking about telling me about this?”
“Well, we’re still in the early stages of... research.”
“You know,” he mused, more to the room than to Sirius, “I’d have thought being Head Boy would have taught James something about responsibility.”
Sirius shrugged, returning his attention to the photographs scattered over his unmade bed. “Why? Didn’t work for you, did it?”
Remus didn’t reply, turning to his own trunk in search of his Charms textbook instead. He sat on his bed and read, the peaceful silence only broken by the occasional flipping of pages or Sirius tearing a photograph into many tiny pieces.
“Oh.” Sirius spoke suddenly, squinting at the photograph at his hands. “It’s that one I took of you, when Pete’s mum sent the black-and-white stuff. If you want it,” he offered by way of explanation when Remus looked up from his book, “you can have it. It’s not as if it’s good or anything, but...” he trailed off.
Remus thought of the photograph, a shot of his back as he sat hobbled over one of the tables in the common room, presumably reading some textbook or another. It was, he had to admit, one of the better pictures Sirius had produced - not that that was saying much.
“Nah. Thanks, though.”
Sirius’ expression shifted so little that it was almost imperceptible, and because Remus was not looking at him, he missed it.
“Why don’t you keep it?” Remus asked without raising his eyes from his book. “It’s not that bad....”
“Why, thanks. I still think it’s weird, though, how you’re not moving. Don’t like it.”
“Fair enough,” he replied, and Sirius brusquely tore the photograph into fourths, dropping the pieces on top of the growing pile of rejected prints.
By the end of the afternoon, most of the many envelopes’ worth of prints had met the same fate, save for a handful of exceptionally rare and decent photographs. The product of fortuitous combinations of diaphragm, shutter, and aperture settings, these found themselves taped all over Sirius’ bedposts, in some sort of final tribute to his lack of skills.
-
It was a terrible spring that year, cold and wet, all rain and mud and a lake that constantly threatened to overflow. They’d thought it fun at first, until the fifth detention for tracking mud inside the castle, and the soft March rain that refused to ease up as April went by and became May.
“Sodding rain. I’m bored,” Sirius complained loudly, shifting yet again atop his bed and knocking a couple of textbooks over in the process. “Where’s James, anyhow?”
“Quidditch. Match on Saturday,” Remus said. “He was saying something about Darnley having ‘obviously sold himself to the Slytherins because he expects us to practice in this hellish rain’”
“What, they’re going to have to play in this weather?”
“You’re the one who said last month’s match should go on despite the hail...”
“Yes, but that was Slytherin,” Sirius replied, making dismissive motions, as if it should have been obvious to Remus that the circumstances were vastly different.
In reply, Remus raised an eyebrow and returned to his book. Sirius grumbled, a constant murmur against the hail pelting the windows, and searched for ways in which to entertain himself.
“What do they look like?” he asked after a while.
“Who?”
“The characters in your books.”
Remus closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m not quite sure. I don’t really... see them, when I read.”
Sirius cocked his head to one side, inquisitive like a dog. “Oh. Why?”
“I don’t know why, I simply don’t. I know what they look like, but I can’t see it. I’m not watching a movie when I read.”
“Then what do you see?”
“Nothing. I just read the words, it’s enough.”
Sirius shrugged non-committally from his own bed. “If you say so.”
Remus returned to his reading again, and was surprised to find his mattress suddenly sag as Sirius carelessly dropped down beside him. Sirius stared at him for a few seconds, then plucked the book out of his hands, flipping through the pages disrespectfully.
“So,” Sirius asked as he scanned the book, “if I ask you what this... Napoleon fella looks like, can you tell me?”
“He’s a pig, Sirius,” Remus replied.
Sirius stared at him, not quite comprehending. “A pig? Filthier than James, you mean?”
“No. A pig. An animal,” Remus said again, a mild note of annoyance in his tone.
“You’re having me on, Lupin,” he said, and then, when Remus didn’t volunteer any more information, “A pig? A pig pig?” Sirius sounded genuinely distressed that Remus would rather read about pigs than amuse him. “What the hell are you reading, anyhow?”
Remus attempted to snatch the book back, but Sirius was clenching it too tightly. “Animal Farm. It’s a Muggle book.”
“Well, yes. Only Muggles would write about pigs.”
“It’s actually rather good.”
Sirius looked at him in that way that clearly meant ‘you’re off your rocker.’ “It can’t be. It’s about pigs.”
“It’s not about pigs, Sirius.”
“There’s a pig on the cover,” he said resolutely, turning the book over.
Remus sighed, and tried to think of how to explain socialism and George Orwell to Sirius in less than five sentences and in a way that would prevent any further questions - he just wanted to finish his book, damn it. “Look. I don’t know how to explain it. But when I read there’s no picture, no photograph. I just don’t think about the characters like that.”
“That makes no sense,” Sirius said with finality, leaning closer. “How can you read a book and not know what the characters look like?”
“I know what they look like,” he said, trying hard not to snap at Sirius. “I just... can’t describe them. It doesn’t work like that,” he trailed off, fingers rubbing the bridge of his nose again.
“But you say you don’t see them when you read,” Sirius nearly wailed, honestly puzzled. “So how can you know what they look like?”
“Look, Sirius. If I tell you that Regulus is in Slytherin and he’s good at Arithmancy and Charms but terrible at Herbology, you get an idea of the sort of person he is, right? It’s the same when I read a book - with what the characters do, you get an idea of who they are, and also of what they look like...”
“Right,” Sirius said after a moment of silence, and gave the book back, still unconvinced. “Sometimes you make no sense, Moony.”
Things would have made more sense if Sirius had gotten up and returned to his bed after that, but instead he pulled up his long legs and stared fixedly at Remus again as the other boy resumed his reading. Staying still for a while, he then gingerly reached out a hand to put on Remus’ shoulder, only to let it drop back down halfway there.
“What now?” Remus asked as he felt the air shift.
“’s nothing,” Sirius replied somewhat sourly, and returned to his bed, sliding the thick drapes shut behind him with more force than necessary.
Remus stared after him, not quite sure what to make of this latest show of temper.
-
If Remus thought Sirius’ behaviour odd at first, he soon learned to get used to it. It wasn’t anything he could put a name to, or anything particularly intrusive; it was just… Sirius occasionally not-quite laying a hand on his shoulder, or Sirius occasionally being overly generous (not that he wasn’t already jumping at every opportunity to squander his inheritance). His friends thought it a new facet of the still-penitent Sirius, who was prone to sudden attacks of guilt and moral decency, and even if they found it somewhat unsettling, they did not think it particularly detrimental to his character.
And really, he wasn’t being that different; he’d been inquisitive and nosy and loud, and he was all of those things still. And he certainly hadn’t stopped punching James -- or any of them, for that matter -- in the arm whenever he got bored and they were within striking distance. But there was something new in the way he was always first to the infirmary, or in how he would actually pay attention in class and take good notes on the days Remus was forced to miss, offering them to him hesitantly, as if he were still fearing some rejection.
So when Sirius asked “You reckon he’s asleep?” when it was just him and James awake in their compartment of the Express, going back home for the final time, it only took James a few seconds to work out who his friend was referring to.
“Yeah,” James answered absently. “Knackered, I’d imagine. After the last two nights... Peter too.”
Sirius grinned; they’d thought of abandoning their plans for a stupendous final prank when Remus pointed out that their last night in the castle would be a full moon, but instead they’d decided to simply carry it out one day earlier. It cost Gryffindor the house cup, granted, but that was nothing when compared to the satisfaction of watching people’s reactions as they were met with the Marauder’s final, and, no longer facing the risk of expulsion, most daring example of creative rule-breaking. Then they’d spent all of last night running through the Forbidden Forest. It was somehow a fitting end to their seven years of mischief.
With another hesitant glance in Remus’ direction, and some nervous swallowing, Sirius spoke again, awkwardly. “I need to talk to you.”
James looked up from Quidditch Weekly. “What, now?”
“No, sodding next year!” Sirius hissed, trying not to wake up the other two boys. “Of course now.”
“All right,” James said, letting the magazine rest in his lap.
“All right then,” Sirius repeated, then fell silent, unwilling to meet James’ somewhat irked gaze.
“Well?”
“I think I like him,” Sirius whispered quickly, maybe under the delusion that if he said the words fast enough, made them blend into one another, they wouldn’t mean what he dreaded they did. “That is,” he continued after James stared at him blankly. “I like him. I think. Moony.”
James sputtered, whether with indignation or just surprise it was impossible to tell. “Oh,” he managed after a while. “Oh.”
James stared at Sirius a few more seconds - clearly too many seconds, because it prompted Sirius to snap, “Well, quit staring at me like I’m some sort of freak, now, Potter! You’d think you’d never heard about Dillon and Boot doing some marauding of their own in school.”
James blinked, trying to work out how Ravenclaw’s Seeker and Keeper were in any way related to Sirius suddenly deciding he fancied Remus. “Oh,” he said again, when it all fell into place. “Oh.”
“Oh I cannot believe this!” exploded Sirius. “You didn’t know. The two best looking 6th year girls snogging each other behind the Quidditch pitch, half the boys wanking off to them every night and you didn’t know! Where the hell were you hiding, Potter? And then I tell you I think I may be a poof and you stare at me and all you can say is sodding ‘oh,’ like you’re that two-year old cousin of yours I had to put up with last time I visited your parents. Sodding hell, Potter, next time I need advice I’m going to have to ask your girlfri-”
“You’re lucky Moony’s a damned heavy sleeper,” James interrupted.
Sirius shut up mid-word and paled considerably. And amazingly rapidly too. His eyes darted around the compartment, falling in quick succession over the spot Lily had vacated shortly before they began their conversation, claiming that she needed to go to the lav, then over Peter’s decidedly uncomfortable, slumbering form and finally resting on Remus, who was wincing every time the train bumped or swerved too vigorously. Much to Sirius’ relief, though, he still appeared to be fully asleep.
The ensuing silence was broken by Lily’s return. “Who were you yelling about?” she asked as she entered. “I could hear you all the way down the end of the car.”
“Sirius,” James said.
“Sirius?”
“Sirius is having an identity crisis,” James supplied. “I mean, it’s not like it’s the worst thing you could be doing, fancying blokes,” he turned back to Sirius, “but, hell, mate, you could have picked a better time to tell me. Not, you know, now.”
Sirius glared at him darkly as Lily asked “You fancy boys?” in a rather high-pitched voice. “No, really, you do?”
Sirius did not reply, just continued to stare menacingly at James.
“I hadn’t noticed,” Lily commented lamely after neither boy offered to answer her question. “You know, it’s rather pretty outside. And think, it’s the last time we’ll ever see this. I wish I had some photographs of it to show my parents,” she sighed wistfully. “Whatever happened to your camera, Sirius?”
“My camera?” he spoke at last, shaking himself out of his sulk. “In the trunk, I suppose. But I reckon a couple of the books we used for the last prank must’ve done something to it; I don’t remember it smelling of Stinksap.”
“Oh, pity,” Lily said, and after a while, “That could just be your socks, you know.”
“Funny, Evans,” he replied, and reached across the compartment to swat at her with half a heart.
-
When they got to King’s Cross, Sirius ambled over to the Potters and paid his respects, with James torn between eyeing him queerly and pretending to be horrified as his mother insisted that he come spend the summer with them. Sirius excused himself quickly, as Peter’s mother was waiting for him on the other side of the platform. In her purse she was carrying a list of every single expense she’d incurred in the past six months on behalf of a certain Sirius Black, although the fact that it was fully itemized was not so much for her sake as for his. Boys, she adamantly believed, needed to learn how to manage money just as much as girls did. If it were up to her, she’d keep them in school a couple more years, if only in the hopes that someone would teach them something about responsibility and housekeeping so she wouldn’t find herself washing Peter’s clothing when he turned 25.
“Hi, Mum,” said Peter meekly while hugging her awkwardly, Sirius and Remus watching bemusedly a few paces away. “Mum, you remember Sirius, right?”
“Of course I do,” she said and beamed at the three boys. “I dare say the people at the photography store remember him just as much.”
Sirius grinned at her in a distinctly flirtatious manner, and Remus fought the urge to shove an elbow into his groin. He could swear he saw the beginnings of a blush creep up Peter’s mother’s cheeks. She rummaged around her bag energetically, until she produced what appeared to be three or four sheets of paper stapled together at the top left-hand corner.
“Here,” she said, in a very businesslike tone. “I sorted them all out so you can check through it all and make sure everything is there. It’s all listed by date, so you can see how much I spent every trip, and down here’s the total. If you have any questions, just owl me - but not through Peter, because he will undoubtedly forget to tell me,” she finished, looking at her son in a mildly disapproving way.
Sirius took the proffered paper and disconcertedly stared at the number, having obviously forgotten all he’d ever known about pounds and pence. Remus, noticing the lost expression on his face, looked down at the parchment and did some quick maths in his head. “It comes out to 30 Galleons,” he said. “But I think I fumbled the pound-sickle conversion, so it could be less.”
None of them knew how much money Sirius had inherited, but judging by how lightly he spent, it was either an inconceivable amount or about to run out. He’d always had money, and apparently he was under the impression that he always would, somehow. “30 it is, then,” he smiled again, and rummaged around his robes in search of coins.
Just as he was done counting them, three more people emerged from the barrier to platform 9 ¾. Sirius must have seen Regulus and his parents out of the corner of his eye, even if he gave no outward sign of it, because just as they walked by, he leaned forward and kissed Peter’s mother on the cheek, certainly for longer than common courtesy dictated.
“Thanks,” he told her with a smile as he dropped the coins into her outstretched palm, eyes shining mischievously. “You’ve really been a great help - it won’t be trouble, converting these to Muggle money?”
This time left no room for doubt. Peter’s mother flushed for a few seconds, but recovered her composure soon enough to manage a “Not at all, my dear,” that didn’t sound quivering in the least.
Later, after Peter and his mother had vanished into the Tube, James and Lily stared at Sirius disbelievingly as Remus finished retelling what he’d just done. “You,” Remus told him, while poking him on the chest as they made their way outside the station, “are utterly shameless.”
“I mean, really, she’s got to be McGonagall’s age,” added James with a shudder.
Sirius grinned, utterly shameless as charged, and shoved the fully itemized list of photographic expenses into a pocket from where it would fall out twenty minutes later, never to be thought of again.
---
narie, 02.07.2004, Chicago, São Paulo, Chicago and São Paulo again.