Chapter 426 - Believe in the Power of Believing

Chapter 426: Chapter 426 - Believe in the Power of Believing

Sirius wore a foul look, mouth pulled down at the corners, nose wrinkled, saying nothing, just staring at him.

Regulus walked on as though the corridor were empty.

Behind him, Sirius worked his jaw, stalled a moment, wrestled with himself a bit longer, then hurried to catch up.

"Done chatting?" His voice drifted forward, drawn out. "You and Professor McGonagall get on well, don’t you."

Regulus didn’t answer.

"Spatial Transfiguration last time, and I got to stay. This time I’m out in the hall?"

Two quick steps put him on his brother’s left, and he tilted his head to peer at him. "You two muttering away in there. Working out how to get me thrown out of Gryffindor?"

Regulus kept walking.

"You’ve got some nerve." Sirius walked backward now, facing him, tone dripping. "McGonagall’s office. You in, me out. Doesn’t that strike you as completely mental?"

Regulus watched the corridor ahead.

"Anyone else pulled that on me, I’d have gone off right there!"

His hands came out of his pockets and started carving shapes in the air, his whole face swaggering. "You get me? Right there!"

The echo carried clean off the stone. Regulus walked, and didn’t spare him so much as a glance.

Sirius stamped hard enough to nearly trip himself.

"Fine. Don’t tell me, then." He caught his balance mid-stumble and went right on running his mouth. "It’s not like I wanted to hear it. Transfiguration, principles, all that rubbish of yours puts me to sleep anyway."

Regulus walked straight past him. Sirius turned and fell in behind, jaw still going the whole way.

At the doors of the Great Hall the noise had already swelled. Food was rising along the long tables, sweet pumpkin juice and the char of roast meat drifting out together.

Sirius’s mouth finally stopped.

He looked at Regulus, nose wrinkling, lips pressing flat, something stuck in his chest that wouldn’t go up or down.

This was exactly how his brother worked.

When he didn’t want to engage, nothing landed. He’d walk past you like you were air.

You couldn’t even pick a fight, because he wouldn’t take the bait, and you ended up performing a one-man show until you felt like the world’s biggest idiot.

He thought back to the office, to that mild, patient way Regulus had told him to step outside, and the anger climbed again.

Where does someone even learn to be that infuriating?

How does a person like that have any friends?

Then he caught himself.

In a rotten place like Slytherin, having no friends was probably for the best.

He shook the thought off, quickened his pace until their shoulders were level, and dropped it out casually. "Talk?"

Regulus’s mouth twitched. He turned a corner and headed for the castle doors.

Behind him Sirius bared his teeth, pulled a face, and followed.

Coming up on five o’clock, dinner hour, and the entrance was crowded with young witches and wizards hurrying in, in twos and threes, talking and laughing.

A few noticed the Black brothers walking abreast from the far end of the corridor and looked twice. Nobody came over.

One Black in Slytherin, a name known since second year, this rumor and that rumor, older students keeping a respectful distance and taking the long way around when they saw him.

One Black in Gryffindor, not much better liked, tangled up with Potter in some new trouble every week, holder of the House record for summonses to professors’ offices.

Two Blacks, each worse to cross than the other.

Out through the main doors, along the base of the wall for a stretch, and the crowd fell away behind them.

Early March in the Scottish Highlands, five in the evening, and the light still held.

The sun hung on the ridgeline in the west, not yet down. Sky spread from overhead toward it in bands, pale blue softening into orange, and thin clouds stretched into long ribbons pinned along the horizon.

Evening wind came at them carrying the dry cold that winter hadn’t finished taking with it.

Regulus stopped with his back against the stone and looked out at the lawn burning red under the last of the sun.

He expected the graveyard to come up.

Sirius had seen him standing with Lucius that day, and the sight had probably hit him hard.

Then he’d bolted without a word.

Not entirely without a word. He’d gone by Apparition, and his technique wasn’t there yet, so it had cracked out like a whip.

Regulus’s gaze drifted.

Sirius had gone quiet instead, standing beside him, the grinning bluster packed away, brows drawn slightly together, lips pressed once.

"Last year you told me," he said finally, pitched lower than before, "that power comes first, then choices, and once you choose you carry what follows."

His eyes stayed on the slope of grass. "I’ve been practicing. It isn’t enough."

Regulus turned his head.

The evening light cut his brother’s profile sharp, and the restlessness had gone out of the gray eyes. What was left looked serious.

Not the question he’d braced for. This one was about power.

"I asked you how you did it," Sirius went on, voice muffled. "You said think. So I thought."

He faced Regulus, a challenge sitting in his stare. "And now?"

Regulus considered him for a moment, then let his mouth curve. "Still think."

Sirius’s face collapsed.

He ground his back teeth like he wanted something to bite, nose wrinkling hard, eyes turning vicious.

Still think? He’d thought. He’d finished thinking. What came after that?

Watching him swell up like a cat ready to spit, Regulus took his time.

Last year, telling him to think had been about finding a direction.

The direction was found. Transfiguration, his talent.

Asking about power now, and getting think again, wasn’t a brush-off.

The same word carried a larger meaning at a larger stage.

Direction first. Path second.

Direction is what you’re good at. Path is why you’re good at it, and how the talent becomes power.

The thinking couldn’t stop.

When the silence stretched, some of the temper drained out of Sirius’s face.

He’d worked out, more or less, that Regulus wouldn’t fob him off about something like this.

Propped against the wall, he frowned and started actually working at it, lips clamped, gray eyes shifting, the lines in his forehead deepening.

The longer he worked, the more lost he got.

Regulus’s mouth tugged upward. Watching him wring his brain out held a certain entertainment value, rare as the sight was.

Sirius didn’t use his head often, and the number of things that got him thinking unprompted was smaller still.

Left to it much longer, though, he’d start smoking.

"What’s your relationship with magic?" Regulus asked.

Sirius blinked.

"How do you understand magic? Magic, you, the world. What’s the relationship between them?" His tone stayed loose. "Ever thought about it?"

Sirius opened his mouth, then closed it.

"If you haven’t, you can start now."

The confusion on his face deepened.

He’d come asking how to get power, and Regulus turned it around and asked about his relationship with magic...

Magic was magic, wasn’t it?

Wave a wand, say the words, magic comes out. Set off fireworks when you’re happy, throw a hex when you’re angry. What relationship?

He tried following the thread anyway. His relationship with magic...

He used magic?

No, that made it sound like magic was something separate from him.

Magic was part of him?

That was wrong too, since nothing happened until he cast it.

Magic and the world, then. What was that supposed to mean? Was the world made out of magic? Or was magic already sitting inside the world to begin with?

The more he circled, the tighter his brow knotted. He raised a hand and scratched the back of his head.

What was any of this?

He stood there glaring up at the sky, frowning one moment and grimacing the next, the gears in his head clearly turning and grinding as they went.

Regulus let the questions stop there.

His brother was an instinctive wizard, and his dealings with magic had always been direct. A thought formed, and the spell came out.

No breaking down the structure, no wondering about principle, no calculating parameters. Magic went from heart to hand with no step in between where anything had to be understood.

Intuition is a complete system of cognition, running parallel to reason. Not a simplified version of it, not a cut-rate edition.

Regulus wasn’t built that way. Reason came first for him.

A problem meant analysis, dismantling, hunting for the underlying logic, and no action until the whole thing held together.

Reason means seeing the road clearly before you walk it. Intuition means walking, and the road appears underfoot as you go.

Both reach the destination. The routes share nothing.

Sirius’s route might be the oldest one wizards have.

Magic itself is a thing of the mind.

The deepest difference between wizards and Muggles is that a wizard can make what lives inside him act on the world outside.

Fire in the heart, fire in the palm. A barrier in the mind, a shield standing before you. Believe in something, and magic answers.

The Patronus Charm is the clearest case. No technique, no reserve of power, only the emotion crystallized inside a single memory. Make the feeling true enough, heavy enough, clear enough, and the silver burns that bright.

Intuition is the most natural channel between a wizard and magic, more direct than analysis or deduction. Magic answers intuition faster than it answers reason, and deeper, and more primally.

Sirius belonged squarely to that lineage.

He didn’t need to know why. He only needed to believe.

And the believing itself might be the magic.

If he could work out his relationship with magic and with the world, arrive at it through feeling, carry some conviction, some certainty, and let magic bloom on its own, his road would run further than most wizards ever manage.

The ceiling on intuition isn’t how much you can perceive. It’s how much you can believe.

Stronger conviction widens the border of intuition. Will and belief are power in themselves. That’s how this world runs.

What Sirius had to do was sharpen his conviction, harden it, believe in something with the whole of himself, and then let magic grow out of that.

It might well be the logic underneath the road Dumbledore had taken.

Dumbledore had always let the world help him, the way heaven and earth lend their strength when the moment is yours.

He believed in love, in choice, in the light inside people, and the whole magical world answered his believing.

Something like that, anyway. Regulus couldn’t be certain. He’d never raised it with the old man. But watching him carry impossible weight as if it were nothing, the odds were good.

Not a road for himself, though. Too much reason in him.

To walk it he’d have to study the ritual first, take apart the mechanism, turn believing into an executable procedure.

Would that still be believing?

He didn’t know. Either way, intuition wasn’t his road.

He could understand it, analyze it, even help someone else find it. He couldn’t set foot on it.

Sirius didn’t need to find it. He’d been born standing on it, and hadn’t yet realized what was under his feet.