a/n: Static Lull makes me want to write things for her. She also makes me fall in love with the HP fandom all over again...even for completely unconventional pairings like these (which will not be named; try and guess). Cheers, Spaffy.

Sirius is made for the slaughterhouse. His eyes look empty even when he smiles, and the way he walks is surprisingly calculated. He walks like he lies; smooth, slippery, wet.

Sirius, quite frankly, scares the shit out of everyone he meets. He has a lack of being able to calm down and simply listen or see or do anything; he keeps himself in a constant flurry of movement. Everything is a rising crescendo.

He is feet slapping against the stairs, nails scraping against the iron gates, tongue pressing hard enough against his teeth to split. He is feral, in a sense, and they love him for it. He's a mad one, isn't he? Girls primping curls with their index fingers, high-pitched laughter bouncing around the corridor as they left and entered classes in packs. Boys discussing the very latest, gossiping like how your mum does when she gathers up all her friends to play bridge. Did you hear what Sirius Black did? He's a mad one, isn't he?

Sirius wore his hair wild, dripping dark-ugly and gorgeous over his collar. He talked with his hands, smiled with his thin lips, enchanted teachers and classmates and that pretty little bartender at Hogsmeade with the maybe-lies that he curled around his tongue and spat out like the mad(der) men by the side of the road, where your dad lived.

You could smell the wildness on him. Oh, you're being silly. Calm down. He's just being Sirius, you know? He was like something straight out of a witching tale—the bad ones, where everyone was eaten by dragons or tied to stumps. Oh, really now. You mustn't take things so seriously, it's bad for your health.

It was a little disgusting. Everyone swarmed around Sirius like he was a god, girls snatching at his cloak, drawing him closer and closer, brightly-colored nails dragging across the whitewhitepalefish skin of his arm. James, that boy who wasn't nearly as wild as Sirius was, no matter what the rumors claimed, grabbing at the back of Sirius's neck, thrusting it downwards and laughing in boyish humor.

It sickened you. Sirius had eyes like someone freshly buried, and James was leaning over him, touching his neck, fawning over him, putting his face close to his. Peter, scurrying behind them, his hand to Sirius's back, between the shoulder blades where his wings weren't. Remus, muttering charm memorizations to himself, his nose partially covered by his notes. He peaks over the edge, catches you staring, smiles tentatively.

You think, I know you. I know every single one of you.

Remus's smile falters; he turns to Sirius, mumbling something incoherent.

"Oh, that?" Sirius shrugs, throws a limp hand towards you. "Right feckin' weirdo, that one." He smiles at the Lupin boy, swivels back to James and says something that makes the crowd around them roar with laughter.

His eyes, you note, are dark. Dark, not like brown or blue or green. Dark like endings. Dark like want and need and hurt and take and you'll come back, right and forever and always trashed into the dirt.

"He's an odd one, Sirius is," Remus admits, "But everyone is, I think. We're all in that stage."

Too close to be possibly comfortable in the library, sharing books and quills and space with the Lupin boy, the one who knows Sirius in a way that he knows his own skin (or thinks he does).

"How very patronizing of you, Lupin."

Remus smiles. "I don't mean to be."

Remus smiles like he enjoys it. His hair is cropped short and light brown, dull in the shoddy lighting. He is probably one of the more intelligent ones in their year, all quick words and snapping wrist movements. He is normal, safe, and relatively pleasant.

Lupin is rather boring, compared to the others. Very tedious, he is, with the way he tears his tie to the cheap shoes on his feet.

"He's a little dead." Remus says. "But we're all in that stage, I think."

Lily doesn't think anything of it.

"I don't care much for Sirius," she says viciously, "I don't rather feel the urge to feel anything at all for him, actually. He's a prick."

"You don't think he looks like he's dying?"

Lily snorts. "It'd be Christmas coming early if he was."

Sirius—wild boy, furiously feral Sirius Black, takes walks on the grounds. He kicks at the crocuses and you think, I know him.

You've never talked with him, but you feel a bit drunk and a little less inclined to actually think for once. It's sometime around two, and you're clawing your way out of the castle to talk to him, and oh, no, he's off and—

"Hey! Hey, Sirius! Wait!"

He stops, and you nearly fall over. The sun's barely coming up and Sirius is standing there, looking bewildered, oozing confidence and dripping that deplorable ugly-prettiness all over the landscape and the sunset and he's looking at you like you've dropped your pants or something horribly embarrassing and you need to say something, something that makes him realize that he's out of place and something straight from bad dreams, and:

"I know you."

You mean it like nightmares and Dad's heavy hands and Lily's scowl and how he never smiles with his eyes and how he drapes himself over James & Remus & Peter like he's got to suck out the very last bit, all the good things, all the brilliance. Like a parasite. Like a dead thing on its feet, mouth wide open and ripping.

Sirius smiles with his thin slaughterhouse lips. "Well, isn't this nice," he says. He chuckles, and the hairs rise on the back of your neck. "Because to be quite honest, I know you too."

He says this like a threat. He says it like a promise.

You reach out, unconsciously almost, and he touches the tips of your skeletal fingers. He smiles thinly, like he's learned it from textbooks.

And you think to yourself, this is what it's like to drown.