A/N: This is a prequel to Family Affair, requested by and dedicated to Forever Siriusly Sirius, my most loyal reader! :D I hope this lives up to all of your expectations, dear!

-C

It had been four long years of Hogwarts and she was about to start the fifth. Matty Clondon waved goodbye to her parents before turning to run back onto the Hogwarts Express, finding an empty compartment and waiting for someone, anyone she was friends with, to poke their head in and come to sit with her.

"This seat taken?" said the teasing voice of one Sirius Black.

She looked up and raised her eyebrows at him.

"Which one?" she quipped back, a bit annoyed that he was bothering her, but then, she had wished for company.

"I'll take that as a yes," he said presumptively, sliding inside and closing the door behind him quickly, taking the seat beside her, the one next to the window, propping his feet up on the seat across from him. "Good summer, Clondon?"

"Who are you running from this time?" she asked, smiling to herself as she looked with curiosity at the compartment door. "Maybe I should invite them in."

Matty made to get up but he grabbed her arm firmly, yanking her closer to him and he glared at her fiercely.

"Don't you dare," he growled.

"So tell me who it is," she countered, rather more boldly than she felt.

He sighed.

"If you must know," he said bitterly, "it's Fabian Prewett. He's still a bit sore about me sleeping with his girlfriend before break."

Matty scoffed.

"As he should be," she said primly, yanking her arm out of his grip as she recalled the massive fight in the common room just before the last breakfast of the year. "That was terrible of you.

"What?" he asked, running his fingers through his black locks almost nervously. "I was so drunk I don't remember a thing. I obviously wasn't thinking straight. She's not even my type! I'm honestly not even convinced it happened. You know she's been in that stupid group of fan girls since... since... well, at least since third year."

That was true, but Matty wasn't going to give up her disgust at him so easily, especially because it was easier to be disgusted at him than dragged down the slippery slope of taking his side on such a controversial matter.

"So how was your summer, Clondon?" he said, flashing her that charming smile of his. "You never did tell me."

"It was fine," Matty said with a shrug.

In truth it had been stressful and entirely too long, but she didn't want to talk about everything she'd had to do about her sisters. Sirius never let up on an opportunity to tease her about them. They were... unconventional. They had a reputation for being crazy, but Matty wasn't ready to slap that harsh diagnosis on them.

The door slid open and a snarling face greeted them.

"Hello, Cissy," Sirius said coldly to his cousin.

Narcissa Black had the Black family gray eyes, just like her cousin, but she was the only one of her family that Matty had ever met with silky blonde hair. Everyone else was dark haired. This was something Matty Clondon found disturbing, coming from a long line of blondes herself, and having very silvery eyes. Matty and Narcissa were self-professed mortal enemies and looked like they could be sisters. Narcissa was a bit more aristocratic, refined, but they had almost the exact same coloring and incredibly similar build.

"Sirius," Narcissa said distastefully, looking over at Matty with her signature sneer of disgust. "I'm just warning you that I have been ordered to watch you this year and report your behavior back to the family. You ought to keep that in mind when you make your... decisions."

She had turned her sneer back to Matty as she iterated her last word as though it were a curse on Matty's very existence.

Sirius had never been particularly close with Matty and hadn't ever let go an opportunity to tease her or her friends, even though it had never been particularly harmful or terrible. But she never would have expected him to do what he was doing in that moment.

He got to his feet quickly, moving between Matty and Narcissa in one smooth movement, a predatory stance as he glared at his cousin.

"Don't you even look at her like that," Sirius snapped. "Don't speak to her like that. She's about six times the witch you'll ever be."

Narcissa's gray eyes flashed as she looked up at her cousin, but she didn't take a step back. She was too proud to do that, even if she was afraid, which Matty would have bet she was. Sirius might not have ever picked on her that Matty was aware of, but everyone knew what he was capable of from watching him duel Snape.

"You really are worse than I thought if you're standing up for that trash," Narcissa drawled.

Matty began digging her nails into the upholstery to resist the urge to claw off Narcissa Black's face.

Sirius surprised her again by whipping out his wand and pointing it square at his cousin.

"You might be family," he said in that same dangerous voice, "and you may be female, but if you say another word I'll disfigure you so badly that no respectable wizard will marry you, no matter how pure your blood is. Are we clear?"

Narcissa finally did back away a few steps, not saying a word, but her eyes still flashing angrily as they looked at Sirius, then at Matty, then back at Sirius. When she was gone, Sirius came back into the compartment, slamming the door behind him and then falling back into the seat beside Matty, who looked up at him with concern and confusion.

"Sirius," she said slowly, softly, "why did you-?"

"Nobody deserves to be spoken to or looked at like that, Clondon," he said shortly. "Nobody."

"And Snape?" she said softly. "What about the way you speak to him?"

He raised his eyebrows, looking over at her with piercing gray eyes. She felt like he was undressing her with those eyes, laying her bare for the world to see, but that was probably her imagination. After all, she was so used to his reputation that even if none of it were true (which she couldn't say for sure), it was the sort of thing she had come to expect from him.

"Do you know the sort of things he says about you?" Sirius whispered. "Do you have any idea the sort of things he goes around saying about you?"

"I know," Matty said softly, looking down at her hands. "He says them to my face, too."

She wasn't going to get emotional in front of Sirius Black of all people. She couldn't even cry about it to Lily, because Lily would never believe such things about Severus Snape.

To her great surprise, though, Sirius didn't belittle her or anything like that. He wrapped an arm around her and whispered, "You should never be treated like that, Clondon. It doesn't matter what I think about you or what you think about me. I know you're a good person at the very least."

As annoying as she found him, Matty knew that Sirius was at heart a good person, or at least, a far better person than the Slytherins he was always at odds with. What she hadn't expected was the kindness he was showing her, the way he was wrapping his arm around her. Were the rumors true? Was he just a womanizer and a show-off?

She'd never known anyone who had ever actually been with him, or at least, no one who was willing to admit it, but now she had to wonder.

Before she realized what she was doing, she jerked away from his hold, moving to the other side of the compartment, just to be safe.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, nay, demanded.

"I'm... sitting here," he said slowly, confused. "I'm taking the train to school like everybody else.

"I mean, why are you sitting with me?" she said. "Surely you have friends you would rather be with. They're not all prefects. I know it's just Remus, he wrote me to say so. I'm waiting for Lily. What are you doing here?"

He just smiled at her thoughtfully.

"You were alone," he said slowly. "I was alone. I... I didn't want to see my friends yet, Clondon. I thought we could be alone together, just for a while. I'll leave when Evans gets here but..."

He looked over at the compartment door and Matty noticed for the first time that he had bruises on the side of his face and a long, just-healing cut down his left arm. Someone was using him as a punching bag or something like it. He wasn't emotionally ready to face his friends, that was what he was saying.

"Sirius, are you okay?" she asked, reaching out without thinking and brushing a bit of hair off a wound, her fingers grazing it gently as she did so. It was difficult to ignore how soft his hair was, the warmth of his skin beneath her fingertips, the strange glint in his gray eyes as he watched her with some expression she couldn't name. She blinked. "What?"

"It's nothing you should worry about," he whispered, his voice sounding strained. "You... I... I don't think I've ever said this before, but you're really... really..."

Whatever she was, she wouldn't know until later, because Mary McDonald and Lily Evans entered the compartment at that moment and Sirius and Matty instantly separated.

"What are you doing in here, Black?" Lily snapped immediately. "Don't you have better things to do than to bother Matty?"

"You're quite right, Evans," Sirius said with a grin and wink. "Just popping in to say hello and wish her a happy school year, but I suppose she's got better things to do, too. I'll leave you to talk about how depraved I am and all the boring things you ladies did this summer. See you at the feast."

Matty opened her mouth to say something to him, anything to say that she wanted to know what he had been about to tell her, but before she could think of any words Sirius had left and she was alone with Lily and Mary, staring at the compartment door as if she could wish him to come back, which was something she never thought she would do.

"Remus said hello, Matty," Lily said happily, sitting down in the seat Sirius had emptied so abruptly, beside Mary, who had already sat. "He said you didn't write very much this summer."

"I wrote!" Matty protested.

"I don't know," Lily said with a shrug. "He seemed to think it wasn't as much as usual. He was all worried about you. I told him that if there was anything wrong I didn't know anything about it."

The strange thing was, there had been something that summer that had thrown her off from usual.

Someone, in the middle of the summer, had sent her a secret admirer letter, and while she couldn't tell who it was, they knew things about her that only the Marauders knew, so she had been a bit stiffer than usual, perhaps, in the letters she had written to Remus, trying to decide if it was him or not as she wrote.

"So what was Black doing here?" Mary said with a grin. "Is he your secret admirer do you think?"

"I hope not," Matty groaned. "I still don't know who it is."

"Well you do realize it's narrowed down to two people," Lily said evenly. "After all, Peter's not clever enough to write you such riddles and Potter... Potter has been writing me love letters all summer as fodder for my fireplace."

Mary giggled. Even Matty cracked a smile.

Everyone found James Potter's obsession with Lily entertaining except for Lily. She scowled at them for their reactions and they eventually were able to calm themselves of their amusement to talk about Matty again.

"So Remus or Sirius," Mary said thoughtfully. "Most girls would want Sirius."

"Matty's not most girls," Lily pointed out bossily.

Matty, though, wasn't so sure.

Given the pick of all the boys in the wizarding world she might not pick Sirius Black, but when it came down to Remus and Sirius... Well it was nearly impossible to see Remus as anything other than a friend. They'd kissed once at a party and Matty had never had a kiss with less spark.

It wasn't that she had any particular draw to Sirius, but she had a feeling that any kiss from him would be packed with spark. She'd heard the stories, people saying that just a brush of his lips could make a girl's knees go weak, that his hands alone could make a girl come so hard they couldn't see straight for a whole minute. And the stories about his cock... well, Matty could feel herself blush just thinking about them.

To say she hadn't thought fondly that it might be Sirius writing to her would be a lie.

But to say that she truly wanted to be with Sirius Black would be utterly absurd. She still had a bit of sense, thank-you-very-much.

"If it were Remus would you date him?" Mary said excitedly. "I'm seen him looking at you sometimes."

"Don't be ridiculous, Mary," Matty scoffed. "Remus doesn't look at me any differently from anyone else. We're friends. And no, I don't think I would."

That was largely the reason behind her tension when she wrote Remus letters over the holiday. She didn't think she had the heart to tell him that she didn't want to date him at all. After all, he was so nice and he hardly ever made friends outside of the Marauders and her own little group of friends that he studied with. He was too shy and he was sick so often.

"What if it's Sirius?" Mary asked, wiggling her eyebrows up and down suggestively.

Matty could feel the heat pooling in her cheeks.

Of course she wouldn't date him. Sirius Black probably wouldn't even be interested in dating, just want a quick shag or two, but she couldn't help but wonder what his breath would feel like on her neck and what path his hands would follow along her skin as he explored her.

"Don't be ridiculous, Mary," Lily snorted, but before they had a chance to follow that conversation further there was a knock on the compartment door.

"Enter," Lily said stiffly, primly.

Matty almost smiled at how Lily thought she was so important, a Gryffindor prefect, as if there hadn't been thousands before her.

The door slid open and Remus and Sirius were standing there, Remus looking sheepish, Sirius grinning madly.

"We need to ask you a terribly important favor," Remus said in his most diplomatic voice, his eyes darting over to Matty for a moment.

"What is it?" Lily asked warily, glancing at Sirius with momentary disdain before turning sharply back to Remus.

"We need to borrow Matty for a moment," Remus said slowly. "I promise we'll return her back in one piece. Other than that, since Sirius and James are involved, I can't really make further promises."

"That's hardly a promise of much," Matty said firmly. "Am I supposed to just follow you without any indication of why or what you're going to do to me?"

"Pretty much," Sirius said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her up.

Matty tried not to gasp as she felt his hand close around her wrist, felt the way her stomach turned excitedly, the way her heart sped up as she found herself chest-to-chest with him. She blinked up at his gray eyes which darkened as their eyes met, but she allowed Remus to lead her off down the corridor of the train with only a wave backward at her friends as she was whisked away to the compartment that housed the Marauders, the greatest troublemakers Hogwarts had ever seen.

"All right," James said with a sigh, "it has come to our attention that you received a letter over the holiday, something about a secret admirer and we want to set the record straight."

"Please don't," Matty whispered, back to their compartment door as they all looked up at her. "Please, I'm perfectly happy not knowing. I'm even happier pretending it never happened. Can we all just pretend-"

"Matty," Remus said gently, and her heart began to race.

It was him. He'd sent the letter. She didn't want to know. She didn't want him to say those words.

"I'm not listening to this," she said firmly, slipping out of the door and rushing away toward her own compartment, desperate to hide.

Knowing meant she had to do something about it.

She was caught by surprise, though, when someone grabbed her from behind and pulled her into an empty compartment, locking it behind him.

"Sirius," she said, glaring at him. "I don't want to talk about-"

"Just thought you should know," he said, talking right over her, grabbing her wrists and pressing her to the door of the compartment with his body, "that you don't get a say in whether or not you know who sent it to you."

"Please," she whispered pleadingly. "Please don't tell me."

He smirked at her.

"All right then," he said slyly. "I won't say a word."

She looked up at him, breathing heavily, trying to comprehend what he had just said to her, but as the words finally began to sink in he pressed his lips firmly to hers, knocking the air right out of her and making her brain absolutely pointless as he just kissed her, too stunned to kiss him back or push him away or do anything at all but stand there. Even that was more on his power than her own.

And then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, he pulled away, winked at her, and watched her sink to a nearby seat as he left her alone in the compartment.

Sirius Black was her secret admirer and suddenly Matty's life felt a lot more complicated.