GOOD DOG || Sirius Black

(Twenty Three: Epochal)

Epochal: Highly significant or important, bringing about the beginning of something momentous

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There was something lonely about the stars.

According to everything that scientists could discern, the sky should be full of them. We shouldn't get to call the night black at all, it should be blazing with a disco degree of independently glimmering suns. It is a literal fact that wherever we look, we're seeing stars. But still, we strain our eyes upwards, and there's these huge gaps of nothing between every pinprick of light. A nothing so huge and consuming that it leaves a sort of gaping hole in the consciousness, like a puzzle piece that doesn't quite fit. 

Then of course there's the fact that, however close they might seem, those stars are millions of light years apart, spread out in amongst the reaches of space like coins scattered in a darkened room, lost among galaxies, each fulfilling the central role of their own solar system. 

Alex could spend her whole life looking for metaphors in the night sky, analysing all the papers that NASA churns out on dwarf stars and interplanitary relationships and the possibility of alien life. She could search for meaning in something that happened thirteen point seven billion years ago, when those atoms that had yet to come together to form her did whatever they did to trigger the Big Bang, but it wouldn't change anything.

She would still be Alex. This would still be her home. She would still have to chug a bottle full of Gryffindor potion every week to feel safe talking to Sirius Black. 

To an extent, she trusted him. She trusted him to not betray Logan, she trusted him to stay loyal to his friends, she trusted him not to mess up her home, the one place she felt like she could just exist. But she didn't trust him to tell her the truth, and she didn't trust him to not mess up her life. Ultimately, Alex really did not want to let Sirius in.

But that didn't stop him trying. She could feel his eyes hovering on the back of her head as she fiddled with the ancient clockwork of the telescope. It was a needlessly complicated thing, too old and too 'fashionable' to be easy to use. Still, there was something calming about the routine of setting it up, something her mum had shown her how to do when she was eight. It came so naturally now, that the sense of things clicking into place was echoed somewhere deep down in her core. She was almost sorry when her chore was complete.

"So," Sirius moved around so that he was standing by her shoulder, "You want to point that thing upwards and look for a system you recognise. Orion's Belt is always a winner, or the Big Dipper."

"I know." Alex shot back before she could stop herself. Despite her grades, astronomy was the one subject that Alex felt almost indignant being told what to do in. Especially on home turf. This was the room that she had grown up escaping into, before her dad had got her a camera for her tenth birthday and the world outside suddenly hadn't seemed so scary when she could view it through that familiar lens. 

She felt Sirius rock backwards on his feet slightly, "You okay there?"

"Wizarding astronomy just sort of pisses me off, that's all." Alex replied, making an effort to force her tone to be more gentle. 

Sirius' smirk was obvious in the way he spoke, "What do you mean?"

"Wizards can make telescopes twenty times as effective as the Hubble without even trying." Alex explained, laying her eye over the lens and making the adjustments. She turned the telescope so that it was facing a very definite corner of space, where a cluster of galaxies shone faintly against that familiar dark, "Look."

She shifted over in the seat so that Sirius could lean over and look through the telescope, which he did, tie trailing over her leg, "What am I looking at?"