Sample 3rd Person - Sirius Black (HP AU)
Sirius and Harry sat on the porch behind the Burrow, staring off into the distance beyond the backyard. It melded into a farmer's field, and where one ended and the other began had never really been defined. Occasionally a stray cow would wander into the yard, thinking it was still on home turf, but everything was empty, for now. Everything was quiet. Sirius had brought with him a sort of tension he hadn't known he was carrying. Like a wave, it washed over the house, shrouding it in a cautious silence, leaving the two figures on the porch alone. There, the silence sank into them, whereas it merely tangoed around the Weasely family, daring them to guess its name.

Things had been this way for half an hour, now. It couldn't have been more obvious that something was wrong, when Sirius turned up in the middle of the day, and asked to talk to Harry. Without Ron, who tried to accompany him. Normally, if Sirius had anything to say to Harry, he would have written him, rather than fly all the way out here. So something was amiss, and it seemed to be getting worse by the moment. Worse for Harry, anyway. He had never dealt with a situation like this before. For most of the past half hour, he had sat quietly next to his godfather, twiddling his thumbs, and watching Sirius chain smoke, out of the corner of his eye. Sirius was the very picture of nervous energy, between the smoking and the erratic tapping of his foot on the porch step.

The smoking and the tapping were starting to make Harry feel suicidal. He couldn't stand it anymore. "Sirius. What's going on?" Having lived most of his life with Sirius, he began to run through his head every scenario he could think of that would be really wrecking on his godfather. Maybe his parents were dead. Maybe Remus was dead. Maybe Sirius was just on drugs.

Sirius exhaled very slowly, drawing out the breath of smoke for what had to have been as long as possible. "I have to talk to you," he said.

"I know. What for?" Harry cut in, before Sirius could finish his thought. If there had even been any continuation of that thought forthcoming.

Again, Sirius took the longest possible moment to perform one simple action. It seemed to take whole minutes for him to grind out the tip of his cigarette on the porch between them. "Do you want the blunt answer, or the let-you-down-easy answer?"

Well...Harry wasn't sure. He was still pretty convinced someone might have died, though. Sirius never acted this way, and nothing could possibly be worse than someone dying. "The blunt one," he said, as solidly as he could.

"I'm a werewolf now."

"What? How could-"

Sirius had a very old Gryffindor scarf loosely around his neck, and now he pulled one side out of the way, just enough that it made Harry wince. That was no vampire bite. That was a godawful full row of teeth. After the initial wince, he thought he might be sick. That wasn't a joke. All this silence wasn't a joke. This was the honest-to-god first truly awkward moment he and Sirius had ever had.

The quiet returned for a few minutes, before Harry spoke again. "How could you let that happen? How could Remus let that happen?"

Sirius cut him off before he could say anything else. "Remus didn't do it. Someone else did."

"What? Sirius-"

"Look, shut up for a minute." There was no letting the kid get a word in edgewise. "I wanted it done. We've always been at risk of being split up, as long as I was human. I couldn't keep living with that."

Harry was a little furious. "So you'd rather live with this, huh? Well, what if you'd fucked it up? What if you'd died instead?" It wasn't in his voice, but in his head, he could feel a panicky note rising. What if Sirius had died? Sirius could still die. He couldn't think about that. It was enough of a struggle not to wonder how much he was missing, without his parents. He couldn't think about having no one.

Sirius didn't say anything. Instead, he lit another cigarette. Harry said, "What's Remus think?"

"He hates it." A shrug and a new puff of smoke. Supposedly, Sirius could die from that, too, but it seemed much less likely to kill him than that thing half hidden under his scarf.

This time, it was Harry's fault that the conversation broke again. He couldn't help thinking that Sirius was lying, or else Sirius just didn't know what he was talking about. Why should Remus hate it, if it wasn't his fault? If it wasn't his fault, then Sirius was just part of his little cult and could really do everything with him, guilt-free on Remus's part. Of course, if it was his fault, and Remus hated it because he was guilty...

"I guess you want me to stay here for the rest of hols."

Sirius glanced over, looking almost guilty himself. "Do you mind?"

In an effort to look put-together about this, Harry shook his head, but his lips were pressed together in a hard line. "Not if you've got stuff to take care of." He forced his lips to smile, and Sirius's gloomy expression seemed to melt into one as well.