Warning: I have a tendency to be really flaky when it comes to writing to be continued type stories. Most of the time it's because by the time I get to the third chapter, I'm so embarrassed of the first that it's hard to make the rest of it work. I do like the premise for this story a lot though, and for once, I'd really like to go the distance with something like this. So, that being said, I went back and rewrote this story in the hopes that I could then like it enough to continue with it. However, in doing so, Sirius under went some changes and I can guarantee that there will be slashy elements to this story in the future (I can also assure you that it won't be Harry/Sirius.) Sorry if this pisses anyone off, it was just my way of trying to redeem this poor thing.

Title: Out of Ashes

Rating: R (for language)

Summary: A sixteen-year-old Sirius finds himself sucked into an alternate universe.

Author's Note: Okay, this is my third and final attempt at writing this idea. I've had two false starts already, and I kind of like the way this one is beginning to flesh out. That being said…*laughs* Yes, much with the randomness. I'm a very random type of person. I just wanted to try writing a fic where Harry was the adult and Sirius was the kid because I think role reversal is fun like that. This is all taking place in a Post-Harry defeating Voldemort world, so it's just going to get weirder from here on out. This is also my first foray into the wild world of alternate universes, so don't get your hopes up.  

*****

Chapter One

*****

"This won't hurt a bit, baby. You won't feel a thing until it's over." That was a lie, and he knew it. She liked hurting him, and had told him so on many occasions. Her cool nails traced lightly over his cheek, and he flinched as they flicked the end of his nose.

"Please, don't," he heard himself beg, sounding like some little snot nosed brat trying to escape a punishment. He'd promised himself he'd never beg her for anything, but he was quickly learning that there was a threshold to which any promise could and would be broken.

"Think of it as a right of passage. You'll be a man when we're finished," she chuckled, moving aside so that one of his cousins could paint a rune on his chest. He would have looked, or wiped it off, or spit in her face, but the manacles at his wrists kept his arms spread eagle, and the strap over his forehead prevented him from looking anywhere but straight up at the skylight above him. Huh. His mother and her many kinks.

"This is crazy. You can't possibly think this will work," his voice quavered a bit as his mother started lighting candles. No, she was going to do this. Hell, given that she wasn't chattering away incessantly, she'd probably done this before for someone else's eldest brat. She'd always planned on going though with this, he could see that now. If he'd been Reggie, things would have been different. 

"Not that you've ever appreciated tradition, Cousin, but even you should be able to see the sense in this."

The sense in it? What possible sense was there in this? They were planning on siphoning off his magic. There was no guarantee that he'd even make it out of the ritual mind, soul and body intact. Hell, he'd be lucky if the initial separation of magic from his body didn't kill him outright. And even if he did make it out of all this by some miracle with some capacity for rational thought left in his head, he'd still become an outcast to everything he'd ever known and lived.

"Let's trade places and then see what you think, Bella," he growled.

"Oh stop being such a baby, Sirius." Narcissa pinched his cheek hard before moving over to light some more of the candles surrounding him.

"Why don't you go fuck Malfoy and leave me the hell alone, Cousin."

"Enough girls," his mother shushed them as she smacked him lightly across the same cheek Narcissa had just abused. "He's not going anywhere, and we've yet to finish the preparations."

"This is just sick!" They weren't seriously going to go through with this! However, from the way they ignored him, it was becoming increasingly obvious that they didn't care what he thought in the slightest. Not that they ever had, really. In fact, the perversity of it all was probably just an added bonus for them. He wondered how many other pureblood families went through shit like this. He doubted that the Potters sat around their kitchen table contemplating sacrifice rituals.

"Baby, try to understand. It's your turn to contribute to this family. Your father and I looked the other way when you got sorted into that house. And we held our tongues when you started spouting that nonsense about muggle rights. You've done nothing but become a burden on this family from the moment you were born. Now, it's time for you to start repaying your debt to what we've given you all these years."

All that they'd ever done for him? Who the hell was she kidding?

He tuned them out as Bella and Narcissa started bickering over god only knew what. He wasn't going to let them do this. Determined, he started chanting under his breath right along with them as they started the ritual. The Dog Star shone bright from above him through the skylight, and he tried to recall the words exactly as he'd seen them in that stupid book Remus had been hauling around for the entire last semester of school. Who knew that Remus' obsession with getting his stupid apparation license would provide him with an ancient transportation spell? Although, a slight goof of a pronunciation and he could end up anywhere. Or spliced in half.

The rune on his chest began to burn, and he could smell his flesh as it smoldered. Had he not already been well acquainted with the sensation, it might have thrown off his own recitation of the spell, but his mother had gone a long way to make her eldest stoic. Grinning wryly now as his married cousins started to give him suspicious glances, he gave the words power, speaking them louder in counter to their own.

His body felt heavier, and the burning on his chest made sweat pop out on his upper lip. He could feel the crackle of magic tangling in the air above him. It occurred to him then that maybe, just maybe reciting a spell while they were enacting one of their own might not have been the best of ideas. But then again, nothing risked, nothing gained. He'd rather face this death than let them have his soul, which was exactly the price they were asking as payment.

Bella screamed in anger and Narcissa tugged violently on his hair, causing him to stumble over a word for half a second before he felt his mind slowly detach and his stomach drop out. It was hard to tell if the blinding light he saw was only a fiction of his imagination or if it was proof that one of the spells had worked. And as his mind slipped away into exhaustion, he decided he really didn't care.

*****

He woke to the sounds of someone screaming and hands at the manacles at his wrists. It took him half a second to realize that the screaming was coming from him, and another two to realize that nothing had changed. He was still on the table, his chest felt as if it were still on fire, and he could still clearly see the Dog Star through the skylight above.

Someone was talking to him, and he felt the manacles slide off his wrists as hands went to unlatch the strap at his forehead. He wheezed slightly before rolling onto his side and curling into a ball. Blearily, he could see that the rune had sunk underneath his skin slightly, leaving the whole mark a raw and open wound. He wondered briefly how long it would take for him to feel the difference in himself. Obviously his spell had failed. Once again, his mother had gotten her way. Maybe at least now she'd finally be happy with him.

Ironic considering that she thought muggles were a couple steps below dead and rotting flobberworms.

"Shh, okay, come on. Let me have a look at that." The deep timbre of the voice had his eyes flying open, and Sirius winced for a moment as he jerked his head up slightly. Stunned, he let the hands roll him back over onto his back.

"How-" he coughed as the words stuck to the back of his sore throat. For a moment, he could have sworn it was James. Same messy hair, the right kind of lanky build. But James didn't have green eyes, and this bloke was a bit old to be impersonating his best friend. Although, he wasn't an entirely bad looking chap.

"You gave me quite the start," a small half smile played at the man's lips, and Sirius frowned. What the hell was this bloke doing in his bedroom? For that matter, where had his mother and his cousins vanished off to? "Usually it's my screams that wake everyone else up. Not the other way around."

"Uh," he tried again only to cough up blood this time.

"Take it easy. We'll get you to Madam Pomfrey, she'll patch you up, and we'll figure out what happened from there."

Sirius nodded weakly, wondering what the currency was going to be for this particular bit of help. Over the years, he'd learned that there was a lot he could tolerate, and that really, there was a great many lengths he'd go to in order to get what he wanted. At the moment? He wanted to live. He'd like his magic back too, but something made him think that that would involve lengths that maybe he wasn't ready for yet. And so be it, he'd work his way up to that. He wasn't a stranger to that kind of adjustment. And who knew, maybe being a muggle wouldn't be so bad. Really.

Morosely, he looked up at the man who the bags under his eyes. The bloke helped him to his feet, and for a moment, Sirius was sure he'd be able to just walk to wherever the bloke was intent on taking him to. And then his legs gave out from underneath him—the man catching him under the armpits just before his eyes rolled back in his head.

*****

"So, he just-" Remus hesitated for a moment, sliding Harry an uncertain glance, "appeared?"

"I don't really know. I just woke up to him screaming. He certainly wasn't there when I went to bed." Running a hand tiredly through his hair, Harry backed up for a moment to watch Madam Pomfrey wave a wand over the last of the unconscious kid's bandages. "I thought we'd gotten rid of most of the more interesting, uh, features of the house."

"Speaking of which, what were you doing there, exactly, Harry?" Harry resisted the urge to flinch at the slight reprimand in Remus's voice. His friend meant well, thinking that Grimmauld Place was filled with bad memories. Remus wasn't entirely wrong, either. The place reminded him of Sirius and all that had gone wrong his fifth year.

But, really, it was the only thing Sirius had left to him. It was the only real and tangible piece of Sirius that he had left. That, and the somber, sometimes sinister feel of the house felt comforting. He doubted Remus would be too terribly thrilled to hear that, but Harry needed to be somewhere where the outside could reflect what he felt inside.

His flat in Hogsmeade was nice, sure. Hermione had helped him—and insisted—on painting the walls a cheerful yellow. Ginny had decorated and color coordinated the whole flat so that it looked like a homey little piece of heaven. Even Hermione's daughter, Alice, had contributed to the effect, placing her childish artwork on his fridge and on the walls of his bedroom.

Quite the step up in life for a boy who had spent ten years sleeping in a cupboard with spiders as companions.

And maybe that was the problem right there. He hadn't liked the cupboard, sure, but it had been all that he'd known in his life for a long time. Long before Hogwarts and learning that he was a wizard and that he was destined to kill people, he'd lived in a cupboard with a family who convinced him that he wasn't worth the effort it took to fix up a spare bedroom.

"I can sleep there, Remus," he said quietly, trying to shrug off the older man's concern. In a lot of ways, Grimmauld Place mirrored some of the same things he saw in himself—the darkness, the disuse, the bad memories. It smelled musty and cramped like his old cupboard, and the fact that the walls were bare and the house seemed to be falling into disrepair made it all that much more familiar feeling to him.

"That can't be-"

"Healthy? Probably not, but it's the only thing that works," Harry interjected before Remus could gear up into his form of gentle remonstration. "And it came in handy tonight. Who the hell is this kid?"

"He looks familiar, but I can't place him. He's not a student of mine, I'm fairly certain."

Well, that threw a wrench into the works, Harry frowned. He was sure Remus would recognize the kid as one of the thousands of Hogwarts students that trickled in and out of Remus's Defense Against the Dark Arts class. "That burn on his chest," Harry muttered, "I'm sure I've seen it before."

"On a certain Potions professor."

"Snape?" Harry looked at Remus in confusion and Remus shot him a pained glance.

"The current Potions professor."

"Malfoy?" Well, he learned something new every day. There wasn't any lost love between him and Malfoy, but they'd reached an uneasy truce somewhere in their seventh year when Malfoy abruptly started voicing thoughts that were opposite from everything he'd stood for during the other six years they'd been at school together. They weren't friends by any stretch of the imagination, but Malfoy had Harry's respect.

"I've suspected for a long time that his burn was part of a botched ritual. This just reinforces the idea." Well, it would certainly explain why the git was so damned sensitive about it. Malfoy had nearly hexed him into next week once for casually commenting that it must have hurt like a bitch to receive.

"What kind of ritual?"

"I wish I knew."

"Well, best of luck getting the answer out of Malfoy." Remus shot him a withering glare at that, and Harry couldn't help but grin back. Malfoy was just as bad tempered and secretive as his predecessor had been. "I'm going to go back and see if I can piece together some clues. At the very least, we should try and contact his parents, right?"

"If, and that's a pretty big if, you figure out who he is, maybe we should hold off on contacting anyone until after we've heard what he has to say," Remus suggested, and Harry supposed he could see the wisdom in the idea.

"He could be from Durmstrang or Beauxbaton, except I didn't notice much of an accent."

"He talked?"

"Well, one word, but it was English and I understood it," Harry shrugged, ignoring the look on Remus's face. "Look, however this ends up coming together, I'll take full responsibility of him until we figure out where he belongs."

"Harry," Remus's tone held a note of exasperated warning.

"Yes, yes, I can't save everyone, and I shouldn't run myself ragged trying. Message received. But he was found in my house, and we don't know who he is, and I am not turning him over to the Ministry. He reeks, and they'll roast him over hot coals for it. You know that."

"So you smelled the dark magic on him, too?" When Remus gave a resigned sigh, Harry knew he'd won this round. Which was good, because as much as he respected Lupin, he wouldn't have backed down on this. He knew how the Ministry—how the wizarding world in general—dealt with runaways and orphans. He'd been trying to revise the statutes for years. "Don't do anything rash."

"I never do anything rash," Harry protested, and Remus rolled his eyes before running hands through his silver hair. "Fine, I won't do anything rash."

*****