A/N: Probably has been done before, but a quick one-shot spanning all the places that Sirius Black called home. Follows canon. Not beta-ed.
Oh and virtual cookies to anyone who spots the reference to the musical 'Chess'.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Home
Until he turned eleven, Grimmauld Place was his home. It was a dark, frightening, loveless house, but it was his playground and his bedroom and his school, and his parents were still his parents and his brother was still his brother. It didn't occur to him that parents hugged their children and that siblings were to be loved equally, he just knew that this was where he lived, and surely that was what made a home? Then he got his Hogwarts letter, and suddenly he had a new home, a Gryffindor home, and he was happy. It was a bright home, a place of red and gold and friends and brothers, and there was nowhere he would rather be. That was the first time Grimmauld Place became a prison, and he wished and longed and begged the holidays to pass quickly so that he could find his way back there once again.
But years passed, until the prison could no longer hold him; he ran, fleeing to James' house and another place and another family and a mother who loved him like a mother should. For a long time he wished he had been born James' brother, but then he learned that you didn't need to share blood to be inseparable, and that brotherhood could span all walks of life, and so he carved himself a new family and a new home, never looking back because it hurt too much to think about his real family, his blood family.
And sure enough they came to shoot him down, friends and family alike, and Peter betrayed him and Regulus betrayed him, and James, James was dead and gone and murdered by a filthy little traitor. And Sirius was rotting in a frozen, grimy cell, where home was a lifetime away, a vague idea of warmth and happiness and all the things he could no longer feel. No, Azkaban wasn't his home, because rage and grief and darkness reflected memories of Grimmauld Place, and Grimmauld had long since ceased to be a happy thought.
When he finally got out, slipping between the bars and swimming to safety, home had dwindled to the feel of sun on his face, the wind in his hair, a comforting smell, and eyes, Lily's eyes in the face of his godson. But sitting shivering in Remus' armchair, he realised that somewhere along the way he had forgotten to take down the bars, that the cell and the dementors were just as surely wrapped around his mind as the ragged blanket was wrapped around his shoulders. The sun couldn't reach him through the windows of his ancestral home, but firewhisky brought warmth to burn away the dementors, to ease him into comfort, and if he woke up in the morning with a pounding headache and sandpaper in his throat, what did it matter, because for a moment or two he had found home in the depths of his bottle.
Yet it wasn't until his eyes were closing and the veil was swirling around him that he realised just how much he had been deluding himself into thinking he could find comfort, because, laying on the grass in the sun with James and Lily looking down at him, he knew he had found at last the real meaning of home.
A/N: Please review so that I know if what I'm doing is okay...