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The Daring Win	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 8178 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
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Chapter Twenty-Four—Sirius’s Mess
Dolores appeared on the pavement across from Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. She did take a moment to check for Muggles before she cast aside the Disillusionment Charm and started towards the door.
It opened before she could get there, and Harry stepped out. Lupin must not have warned them that she was coming, because he stared at her with huge eyes before he leaned back and called, “Sirius!”
Dolores didn’t bother speaking. It would only be screaming. A few Muggles walked back and forth, or drove, down the street. She wouldn’t air their business in front of them. But Sirius would get his fill of her tongue behind his ancestral walls, yes.
“What? I didn’t know you could shout that loud, Har—”
Sirius’s voice cut off because Dolores had her wand pressed against the underside of his jaw, and she smiled sweetly at him. Then she shoved him back into the corridor. She did it hard enough that Sirius literally choked and flailed around with his hands.
“What is it?” he asked, and his voice was rough and rasping. He bent over at the waist, coughing. Dolores would have been more sympathetic if he hadn’t done—what he had done. “You can’t just come in here and do that!”
Dolores grabbed his hair and hauled his head back, jabbing him in the stomach with her wand this time. The sound of his choked-back breath made her simmer with mad, reeling joy. “And you can’t take my ward and disappear into oblivion,” she snarled back at him. Her vision was streaked with red. “What did you think you were doing?”
Sirius flinched and stared at her. He said nothing.
Harry was the one who stepped up and tugged on her sleeve and said, “Miss Dolores, you’re hurting him.”
“Good.” Dolores didn’t look at Harry. One glimpse had been enough to see that he was unwounded. Whether Sirius would remain in that condition remained to be seen. “Then he can suffer a sliver of the pain that I felt when I thought you had been kidnapped.”
“Why did you think I’d been kidnapped?”
Dolores turned to stare at him without letting go of Sirius, and stomped on the foot Sirius tried to slide between her boots. Under that stare, Harry’s eyes fell away before her. “The whole prank was predicated on me having that reaction,” she said, and kicked Sirius’s feet out from beneath him, releasing him as he went down. “Or he wouldn’t have played it.”
Harry mumbled something.
“What? Speak up.” Dolores glared again at Sirius. He still hadn’t started to laugh and joke, which was good in a way, because it meant that she didn’t have to try harder to murder him, but also unexpected.
“I said,” Harry spoke clearly and loudly, lifting his head to meet her eyes, “Sirius said that you wouldn’t be that angry. You would worry just a little. You wouldn’t think I’d been kidnapped.”
“Why the hell not, with people who want custody of you and possible former Death Eaters wandering around?”
She usually tried not to swear in front of Harry, but right now it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing did but the next reply that emerged from Harry’s mouth.
“Because he said you didn’t care about me that much.”
Dolores heard the words with what seemed to be more than her ears. She turned back to Sirius, and her anger was pounding and roaring in her throat. “Did you tell him that?” she whispered, and her voice shook, but her wand didn’t shake, that was the important thing. It was once again pressed to Sirius’s pulse. “How dare you make him think that his current guardian didn’t want him? That’s what the Muggles did. How dare you.”
Sirius’s eyes were wide and still mostly uncomprehending. He did say, after what seemed like most of a minute to think about it, “I didn’t think of it that way. I didn’t know he might take it that way.”
“You bloody well should have.”
Harry reached out and grabbed her sleeve. His eyes were bright and determined as he gazed up at her, and his hand didn’t let go even when Dolores tried to move her arm away. “Can you stop hurting him, Miss Dolores? I know he didn’t mean it.”
“What he should have meant is—”
“It’s okay,” Harry whispered, the same way she had talked to him some of the times when he wanted to make sure she wouldn’t send him back to the Dursleys or to Dumbledore. “What he did was stupid. But he won’t do it again.” He gave Sirius a look that Dolores thought was significant. But she couldn’t read it.
Dolores shut her eyes and worked on hauling back her temper, giving herself some control over her hand on the wand. Slowly, she managed to lower it to her side. She stepped back so Sirius could get up. But she kept her hand on Harry’s shoulder—the way he did on her sleeve—and moved him with her.
Harry didn’t seem to have any objection to that. When Dolores opened her eyes and looked down again, he was smiling gently at her, his head tilted back and his face soft and clear.
“I knew you would come for me. I knew you cared about me. I didn’t listen to Sirius when he said you didn’t.” He leaned his head against her hip.
Dolores gently stroked his hair, and said nothing. She was still furious with Sirius for having played the prank at all, but if it really hadn’t affected Harry that much…she could forgive him. She would just have to make sure that he really never did do anything like that again.
And she wanted to know his motive for saying what he’d said. Just part of the prank, or had he convinced himself that she wasn’t the best guardian for Harry and he was better off trying to take custody of Harry away?
Never.
Dolores waited for a moment. No one else said anything. Harry had said all he needed to say, in truth, in order to convince Dolores to go gently with Sirius. This was Sirius’s moment. Let him stand up and prove that he could be trusted again, that Dolores didn’t need to send him away.
But he stood there and glared at her. The sullenness was what convinced Dolores he wasn’t dangerous right now. He had been glowing good humor—probably fake, but still—when she’d heard him blackmail Lucius. Right now, he seemed mostly sulky that she wasn’t taking his prank the way he wanted it taken.
“Should I even ask?”
The words seemed to break the wall between them. Sirius leaned forwards and stabbed a finger at her. “You never let Harry have any fun! You’re always telling me what time he has to be back by, and he can only keep Pardus if he does this and that, and you’re always yelling at him about manners—”
“Miss Dolores doesn’t yell.”
“Well, fine.” Sirius waved his hand, and his face turned red. “But I see her hoisting her eyebrow at you all the time!”
“That’s not the same as yelling, Sirius.” There was a thickness in Harry’s voice that Dolores knew wasn’t tears, if only because she didn’t think Harry would cry for a reason like this. And sure enough, a second later, it came bubbling out as laughter. “It’s really not the same as yelling!”
Dolores concealed a smile, because she thought it would only infuriate Sirius right now. He didn’t seem to know what to do with Harry’s laughter, on the other hand. When he folded his arms, she intervened smoothly. “The reason I do that is because Harry is seven years old, Sirius. That isn’t the same as letting him do whatever he wants. He’s not an adult. And I do expect the adults who take him to Diagon Alley and other places to be responsible ones. Likewise, if they get him a pet that can’t behave, then the pet will have to be taken away.”
Harry tensed, but Dolores ignored that. She wouldn’t remove Pardus without a very good reason. Perhaps the reasons had even changed since Sirius had first got Harry the kitten.
“But Harry doesn’t want to live like that! He doesn’t want someone fussing over him every time, and telling him what he can do, and—”
“Actually, I do.”
Sirius gaped at Harry. Dolores didn’t let anything show on her face. “What? Pup, you can’t be right! No kid wants to go to bed on time and tell adults the truth and be punished! When I was your age, I wanted to sneak into Muggle London and stay up all night and eat ices until my face fell off!”
“But the Dursleys didn’t care about me,” Harry said, apparently to the wall, or Dolores’s robe. “I know all about Muggle London. They didn’t care if I was awake all night or not. I still had to get up at dawn to make their breakfast anyway. I didn’t get a pet. They would have just taken it away.” He took a deep breath that made it sound like something was being dragged up his throat, and then looked appealingly at Sirius. “Sirius, can you just—leave it alone? Believe me?”
Sirius was still standing there, looking between them as if someone had taken away his kitten. Then he sighed. “I’ll believe it. But—I need to talk to your Miss Dolores.” His eyes bored into Dolores for a second before he turned sharply away.
Dolores suspected she knew what he would say, what was behind this “prank.” She gently detached Harry’s hands from her robe and smoothed her hand over his hair when he stared up at her. “Can you be on your own for a little while, Harry?”
“I only want it to be a little while.”
Don’t leave me like the Muggles did. Dolores didn’t need a spell to know what his words would be. She bent down towards him and lightly touched his forehead. “I know. I don’t think this conversation will take long.”
He nodded, but his eyes were sharp in a way that said he was going to hold her to that. Dolores smiled and turned to follow Sirius into the kitchen of Grimmauld Place.
*
“I know you don’t really care about him. I know you only became his guardian to have political power.”
Dolores had locked the door of the kitchen behind her and set up several privacy spells automatically. She paused with one hand on the back of a dining table chair and looked at Sirius. He was stalking back and forth so fast that she wasn’t surprised he wavered and tripped near the counter. He grabbed hold of it and stared at her between strings of his hair.
“You’re not even trying to deny it.”
“I wanted to take custody of him once I realized who he was. No magical child should be left to be raised by Muggles, that’s true, but I would have left him at the proper Ministry department and said good luck to him if he was anyone else.”
“Then you don’t care about him!”
Dolores smiled. “Tell me, Sirius. Did you care about Harry when you went to go chase down Peter Pettigrew on your own? Without even telling other people that he was the traitor, which would have enabled the Aurors to be called out for him?”
Sirius’s hands flexed like claws. “We aren’t talking about that.”
“We’re talking about behavior that another adult thinks means I don’t care about Harry. I only see a duty to ask the same question back.”
“I was grieving. I was emotional. I wasn’t thinking clearly. But now I’m trying to do the right thing by Harry.”
“By undermining his confidence. By making him think that the guardian he trusts is going to abandon him just like the Muggles. By saying—”
“You don’t care about him!” Sirius howled. His face was twitching in a way that made Dolores take careful hold of her wand. “That wasn’t a lie!”
“I do care about him,” said Dolores, and didn’t snap. She knew she would have a hard enough time convincing Sirius to shut up about this and not keep repeating the words around Harry. They would hurt him, but Sirius wouldn’t care about that if he thought he was “rescuing” Harry from her. “Not the same way you do—”
“Ha!”
“But that is because I am not his godfather,” Dolores said, and her glare must have withered Sirius a little, because he hesitated instead of moving forwards to strike her. “I have a responsibility that is different than yours. You may play pranks with him and buy him pets and take him to have fun. I am the one who has to set boundaries and discipline him and explain to him why he has a bedtime.”
“You’re the one he wants to escape,” Sirius whispered, but he wasn’t looking at her now.
“Has he ever said that?”
“How can he not want to escape someone like you?”
Dolores smiled. This situation wasn’t so dangerous after all. What mattered was that she should pick the right argument. “Are you basing your remarks on Harry? Or on the boy you were, desperate to escape his family?”
Sirius’s hand clenched into a fist, down by his hip. Dolores nodded. “I thought so. You were a miserable, unhappy child, Sirius, I won’t deny that. But that’s not the same thing as assuming that anyone who gets a bit of discipline is unhappy.”
“Harry told me about you drilling him in all these manners,” Sirius spat, as if the word was a patch of poison clinging stickily to his tongue. “And I’ve seen you pinch his shoulder, or his ear.”
“And of course,” Dolores said softly, “what you would do for him is so much better.”
“I would never pinch him!”
“But would you raise him with boundaries, Sirius, if he was yours alone to raise? Or would you teach him to play pranks and laugh and not be sensitive to the currents of politics around him, and then gape at people when they told you that they wanted to take him away from you?”
“You may not be aware of how vicious I can be.”
“I know it. Because of the way you chose to play this prank.”
Sirius’s triumphant look faded, and he lowered his head and fidgeted a little. Then he said, “I just don’t understand how Harry can be happy with you.”
“Because I am such a disciplinarian? Because I have no connection to his parents in the way you do? Do enlighten me, Sirius.”
“Because it’s like—you’re not raising him to be independent of you, or a political player because he has to be. You’re raising him as if he should enjoy politics!” Sirius seemingly gasped for a word for a second, then found it. “As if he’s going to go into Slytherin!”
Dolores meant to stand solemn and serious and help Sirius to see the ridiculousness of his words without truly criticizing him. But the words simply struck her, and she reacted before she thought about it.
She laughed.
Sirius heaved himself up into an upright posture that seemed to take quite a bit of work, and looked down his nose at her for a minute. “You can laugh at me all you like,” he said. “But I’m still more dangerous than you think.”
“I’m not laughing because I think you’re pathetic,” said Dolores, although part of her did think that. “I’m laughing because making him a Slytherin was the worst thing you could think of. You didn’t say I was raising him to hate Muggleborns, or to hate his parents, or to be a Dark wizard. A Slytherin.” She snorted.
Sirius only looked at her with uncertain eyes, and the last remnants of Dolores’s laughter faded. She suspected that Sirius had reached for that “insult” because that was where his mind was largely stuck. He had been in Azkaban for so many years not that long after he’d left Hogwarts, it made sense that his school memories occupied more of his life than they usually did for someone his age.
That didn’t mean Dolores was going to let him get away with insulting her and challenging her guardianship over Harry.
“If you want Harry to learn something, help teach him, the way I and Lupin do,” she said, and moved towards the door. “But I will not tolerate pranks like this.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I know how dangerous you are,” Dolores said, pausing with her fingers on the door. “I heard you threaten Lucius.” He went pale. “But you don’t know how dangerous I can be yet. I don’t think you want to find out, Sirius. You really don’t.”
She opened the door and went through, and found Harry hovering outside, his head tilting up immediately when she came out. His back tensed as though he thought someone was going to plunge a knife into it.
“Are you and Sirius all right? Can he go on living with us?”
“Yes, he can.” That is my strength, that with all my disapproval of Sirius, I can tolerate him better than he can me. Dolores knelt down in front of Harry. “As long as you’re sure that you want to live with me and don’t want to come be with him.”
“Not—not on our own,” said Harry, and abruptly flung his arms around her.
Dolores didn’t think it was more than a minute before her arms moved, curving around Harry, holding him tight. Even if it was, she thought only Sirius, standing behind them with dazed eyes, would notice.
“Then you won’t have to,” Dolores whispered against Harry’s ear. “I’ll make sure that you don’t have to.”
The tightness of Harry’s arms around her in response was its own answer.
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The Daring Win