A/N: Myklos appeared in another of my fics — Harry Potter and the Eversion of Magic — and has been asking for his own story ever since. I'd always had half an idea of how Sirius had survived Azkaban. Rowling's explanation seemed trite but it is only what Sirius told Harry and he would hardly go into a lot of detail. The tattoos aren't canon; the books don't mention them, but what the heck, I like them.
I took the title from Warren Zevon's 'Prison Grove'.
Thanks to Erin for beta-reading.
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BURNS AND SCARS
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Part One
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When Sirius Black arrived in Azkaban, Myklos had already been there for ten years. Long enough that it seemed his life before had been no more than a pretty dream.
It was the nearest thing he'd had to a home since he was twelve, when they had come to him in Durmstrang to tell him that his Muggle parents had been taken by the Secret Service and the farm was in ruins. After that, it had been just him and Luka. The two of them against the world, or so it seemed. Living by rules they made up as they went along; leapfrogging back and forth through Poland, Russia, Romania, Germany, France, Italy.
The murky chaos of Muggle espionage and political machinations presented opportunities aplenty for a pair of energetic, talented and amoral wizards. Bullion carried in Russian military convoys, the treasures of defunct royal houses hidden in bank vaults, works of art in museums and galleries—all were easy game. Profit was never the motive. It was all about the hunt; the thrill of the chase. The Balkan Bears people called them, and they had revelled in the notoriety.
Always one step ahead of the authorities, they had grown complacent, and complacency brought bigger projects: more audacious plans. The Vatican held riches galore, and Gringotts!—oh Gringotts was even richer. But Gringotts had been an Auror trap laid for them by Britain's Department of Magical Law Enforcement headed by the ambitious Bartemius Crouch. A trap Myklos and Luka had fallen into like gnats into a spider's web.
Crazy with guilt at his own carelessness, Myklos had killed two Aurors and tried to kill Crouch himself. But it had not prevented Luka spraying the end of his life on to Myklos's face in droplets of blood.
The Wizengamot hearing a day later, had been brief and businesslike. Standing alone in the dock far below the London streets, with dried blood itching on his skin, Myklos could still feel the imprint of Luka's body in his arms. Luka: his companion, friend, partner, collaborator, lover.
And as Crouch, eyes and voice as hard and smooth as glass, pronounced sentence, Myklos knew he would never again feel the sun on his face or cool grass on his bare feet.
Since then, Crouch's inexorable ascent had been mirrored by a steady increase in the population of the prison. From his early rigid, unquestioning loyalty to the Ministry and strict adherence to the regulations, he had become a man whose sense of righteousness bypassed inconvenient rules. Myklos heard reports of trials ever briefer, ever more perfunctory, until new prisoners began to arrive desperate, confused, and disbelieving, having had no trial at all.
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Part Two
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Azkaban had been hewn from the same dark dolerite that formed the cliffs on which it stood. From a distance, it could easily be mistaken for a natural rock formation. Thick hanks of brown seaweed hung from the rocks at the base of the cliffs, and the sea that crashed into them was clogged with dense forests of kelp. A network of caves had once been used as stores and cellars but the charms that used to keep the sea at bay had faded and no one cared enough to redo them. Now, at equinoctial high tides, jets of spray funnelled through cavities in the masonry and squirted between the greasy floorboards of the kitchens above.
The outer walls were as thick as the height of a man, and the few windows were narrow slits, just wide enough for a prisoner to crawl into and gaze out at the grey sea and sky and the glistening black rocks. It smelt of rotting seaweed and fishy bird guano and mould and boiled cabbage.
The constant cold kept flies away, but woodlice the size of teaspoons, and articulated insects with metallic grey carapaces infested the damp timbers. Overhead, seabirds constantly circled in the peculiar air currents.
They said that a prisoner who survived the first five years would be good for another fifty. But weakened by the attentions of Dementors and finally carried off by cold and damp and despair, not many did survive for five years. And maybe those who didn't were more to be envied than pitied. Sometimes, when the bodies had been stripped of anything useful, they were collected by a parent or sibling or friend or family house elf. More often they were 'buried', which meant being thrown into a fissure in the cliffs where the remains eventually washed out to sea.
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Part Three
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Myklos moved freely around the crumbling fortress. His talent for releasing any lock was, he had sometimes boasted to Luka, legendary. Yet the prison authorities had never acknowledged it. They did not need to. Discipline depended on fear of the cold, amorphous Dementors, and the apathy instilled by use of the doctored Solanum leaves they called Malevolence.
In the first year of his sentence, Myklos had tried chewing the leaves. The bitterness had worn off as the tingling in his mouth turned to numbness. That night he had dreamed, vividly, of Luka, laughing and full of mischief. But when Myklos had woken, Luka had still been dead, and Myklos's mouth had felt as if one of the shabby terns that nested in the cliffs had died on his tongue. His spit and piss had been brown for days and he had never tried it again.
A few other prisoners had abilities not dependent on possession of a wand. Ceorfan only had to touch a knife blade to give it an edge so sharp it would draw blood before you knew you had been cut. And Ralph, always hot to touch and whose footprints steamed on the damp floors could draw fire from anything. But Myklos was the one who could open locks, and in a prison that talent brought the greatest advantage. He could get food, knives, and hot coals from the kitchens: blankets and extra robes from the stores. And he made it his business to salvage the belongings of those who had died.
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In spite of their fearsomeness, the Dementors were relatively few in number and were, at predictably regular intervals and for reasons known to none but them, absent altogether. Learning to know when they were nearby and to hide and camouflage any pleasurable thoughts were essential skills to learn. Survival depended on it. Beyond the confines of the prison, Dementors were said to feed on happiness and optimism but in Azkaban even the memory of those things was in short supply. What they fed on there—when they could find it—was Hope.
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The more privileged prisoners—the ones whose families sent luxuries: chocolate, cigarettes, an occasional bottle of wine or firewhisky if the human warders were offered sufficient inducement—paid generously for his services. He could always find an empty room in the keep suitable for six or eight well-heeled prisoners to gamble on gobstones, or dice, or cards, or woodlouse races. Myklos, who had never had an aptitude or inclination for games of chance, did not play. Always the banker, his instinct for commerce combined with an efficient, impersonal ruthlessness made the other prisoners deferential, not knowing when they too might need his services. Even Orcus, whose mother had been a Breton ogre and whose main talent was for causing pain and humiliation, kept a respectful distance.
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During an early exploratory mission, Myklos had discovered a flight of narrow stone steps behind a barred gate. The lock had long since rusted solid, but it opened for him. The staircase led down into the caves where grey daylight trickled reluctantly in through a narrow cleft. Until the channel had silted up into a low sandbank, small boats had been able to load and unload cargoes there. Broken hogshead barrels with rusty bands and shreds of sailcloth poked out of the sand between drifts of seaweed, dead birds, and oyster shells. Soft scales of anaemic algae formed uneven high tide lines on the rocky walls.
Wedged high up between two natural pillars, where it must have been hurled by the waves in a violent spring tide, Myklos had found a long, thin crate. Several days of surreptitious visits had been needed to dislodge it. Inside, he had found two brooms wrapped in thick canvas. Perhaps, long ago, they had been confiscated or were being sent for repair. The best one, made from nigh indestructible Huon pine which still smelt of resin though it must have been at least two centuries old, had been repaired, but the bristles were tattered and loose. It was good for no more than a few hundred yards. The other was oak, so worm-eaten and rotten that the shaft felt like dry sponge. A firm grasp would see it crumble to dust.
Still, when Myklos had first found them, he had taken the Huon pine broomstick up on to the high outer rampart and thought about using it. About letting it take him as far as it could. But there was no escape from Azkaban. The sea was cold and always rough. The tooth-like rocks that ringed the island were sharp and vicious: the cliffs vertiginous. When it wasn't raining, mist as thick as porridge poured up the cliffs, and up over the walls and down into the courtyard, deadening the sound of the turbulent sea and the mewling birds. No man had ever escaped that way and lived to tell the tale. In any case, without Luka, what would he escape to?
He had wrapped the brooms in the canvas again and hidden them up the chimney of a fireplace in a derelict part of the kitchens.
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Part Four
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Myklos watched from an inconspicuous doorway above the central courtyard as Sirius Black was brought in, frogmarched unresisting between two sullen warders. Black was the one they said had sold out his friends to the Dark Lord and killed a dozen Muggles for sheer spite. His guilt so far beyond doubt that Crouch had sentenced him without even a token trial.
The warders locked him into a dismal cell near the courtyard a good hundred feet from any other prisoner. A cell whose door, unlike the solid timber doors elsewhere, was made of iron bars and had a six-inch gap at the bottom. Black would not be able to avoid seeing prisoners arrive—and on occasion leave—but could not speak with anyone. It seemed an additional insult, so why sight of the barred door caused Black to draw his lips back over his teeth in a canine grin was a mystery.
Myklos, whose familiarity with the shadowy underbelly of the wizarding world was extensive, thought the young man—hardly older than a boy—did not look like a killer. Black was graceful. Well bred. Even Myklos could see that. He moved not—as Orcus said later, leering and making obscene gestures with his meaty forearm— like a woman, but like an animal, albeit a tired, beaten one with no spark of resistance behind his flat, pale eyes.
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For the first week or two, the Dementors had hovered around Black's cell drifting in and out and sliding through the corridor like oil, but they soon lost interest. That, in Myklos's experience, indicated that the prisoner had lost all rational thought. But by the time the Dementors had grown bored with Black, he was still far from being a vegetable.
More interested than he should have been, Myklos wondered how the youth, as passive as he appeared, evaded the Dementors' notice with apparent effortlessness. He knew from his own restless nocturnal perambulations around the prison, that often Black's cell was empty though the door remained locked.
The contempt with which Black was treated by the vicious Death Eater, Dolohov, would have surprised Myklos if he had not already had doubts of the young man's guilt. Doubts reinforced a few months later by the arrival of the Lestranges amid much disruption and noisy protest.
Along with the Lestranges had come the Crouch boy, sentenced without favour by his own father. He had screamed for days, protested his innocence, begged his mother to come for him. Given the Dementors a frenzy of whatever it was they craved. Until finally, like all prisoners who did not learn to mask their emotions, he had fallen silent.
There were women in Azkaban of course. Not many, true. But sometimes, walking alone on the ramparts, Myklos could hear them screaming and crying. Now and then one of the men bribed him lavishly to open the gate between the men's and women's quarters. Though Myklos did not consider himself to be a principled man—principles being a luxury conveyed by privilege—there were some things he would not do. And allowing the bully Orcus access to the women's quarters was one.
Myklos did not care for Russians but he would not let his prejudice get in the way of a commercial transaction and Dolohov had paid handsomely in Ukrainian vodka for access to his lover, Mad Bella. The woman's own husband—a sadistic idiot—had shown no interest in visiting her himself. But beyond the economics of facilitating those assignations, such matters were of no interest to Myklos. The arrangements that Black was making for his supply of cigarettes, however, were.
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Part Five
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A couple of months after Black's arrival, Myklos saw him sneaking down a passage one morning when he should have been locked in his cell. Black's face was bruised, there were smears of blood on his robes and he walked awkwardly. But he was smoking a cigarette instead of chewing on the freely available Solanum leaf; sucking deep as if he needed the smoke more than he needed air.
Had it been worth it? Myklos's gut cramped at the thought of that slender body impaled and torn for the sake of a simple smoke. Such a waste. He could have intervened then, but something about the young man's fierce bravado held him back.
A week later, things were worse. Myklos followed a trail of fresh blood to Black's cell, and peering through the bars, saw him rolled up tight in the corner.
Why Myklos experienced a pain inside his own chest he could not have explained. He slipped quietly inside.
Black was alive. A couple of broken ribs but not, Myklos thought with relief—the press of his practised fingers making the injured Black groan—a punctured lung. His kidneys and spleen were bruised. No doubt he would be pissing blood for a day or two, but he would mend.
Sirius did not ask how Myklos had opened his door. And Myklos did not ask how Sirius had got out of his cell and back again in that state without, apparently, opening the door at all. "Who did this?" he asked without really needing to.
Sirius did not answer, his eyes closed.
"Orcus," said Myklos. "No? You should keep out of his way. Next time he kill you."
Sirius opened his swollen eyes, shrugged and winced. "A fitting end to the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, don't you think?" he gasped. "Buggered to death in prison by a halfbreed ogre. My mother would be so proud." He was holding something tightly and opened his fist with an effort. "Would you mind?"
Myklos eased the cigarettes and matches out of Sirius's hand, put a cigarette in his split, misshapen mouth, struck a match against the floor and lit it. Sirius drew deeply, the end glowing bright and crackling.
"Where you think Orcus get these from?" Myklos asked. "You let yourself be buggered by wrong person."
Sirius groaned and closed his eyes. "Wrong person, wrong place, wrong time. Story of my damn life." He started to shiver violently and drew himself into a foetal ball.
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Orcus's body was found on the rocks at the base of the East wall. Most of the blood had been washed away by the rain. His head was located in a rock pool a few days later.
Sirius met Myklos's gaze squarely between the bars of his cell door. The bruises on his face had turned yellow and the swelling had gone down.
"You are better. I am glad," said Myklos.
"I heard Orcus is dead. How did that happen?"
"Why you ask me this?"
Sirius was silent, his gaze searching. "You practically run this place," he said. "Nothing happens here you don't know about."
Myklos didn't disagree. "I not be interfering."
"No?"
"Not often. But always will be one like Orcus. It how these places work. I can give you protection."
"So you can bugger me instead, old man?"
"You think your mother would prefer?"
"I doubt she'd see it as a better class of buggery."
"I not touch you unless you want."
"And if that never happens?"
"Then I never touch. Orcus dead, Sirius, but always will be another to take his place. Rabastan Lestrange already making friends."
Sirius's shoulders sagged and he turned his face to the wall and retched quietly.
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In one of the gaming rooms, Ralph made a crude sigil on a piece of broken iron bar. Sirius waved away the offer of Solanum leaf and lounged across the rough table with no sign of misgivings as he watched Ralph tease the brand first to a red glow, then white.
"You are sure?" asked Myklos.
Sirius spat at the floor. "In for a knut, in for a galleon. I'm not going anywhere."
"You want vodka to dull pain?"
Sirius shook his head and grinned fiercely. "It's dull enough in here already. Get on with it."
The brand sizzled as Myklos pressed it onto the left side of Sirius's chest.
"Mmm, smells good," Sirius said between clenched teeth. "What's for dinner?"
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Part Six
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Myklos never took advantage of his ability to visit Sirius's cell without invitation but many times he had looked inside and found it unoccupied. He held his counsel. Sirius would tell his secret when the time was right. And Time, after all, was the one thing they had in abundance.
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One night Myklos woke with a start at an unexpected tapping against his door and found Sirius outside.
"Aren't you going to ask me in then, Myk?"
"You tell me how you get out of your own cell first."
Sirius's laughed and his eyes flashed silver in the darkness. Then the air shifted invisibly and Sirius was gone. Myklos almost cried out in alarm. All he could see was a darker patch in the gloom. But no, it was not just a dark patch. It was a dog.
Myklos had laughed; silently so as not to attract attention. Slapped his hands on his thighs. Whispered, "Clever!"
The dog brushed past him and padded into the cell. Then Sirius slipped under the blanket on Myklos's thin mattress and held out his hand in invitation.
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"You did not do it," said Myklos later, watching the glow of Sirius's cigarette in the dark, with Sirius's head on his shoulder, blowing warm smoke on to his chest.
"I might as well have done," said Sirius. "Just because I didn't cast the killing spell doesn't mean I'm not guilty."
And Myklos remembered Luka and knew the truth of this. "But they never leave us," he said. "The ones who loved us. They always with us."
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Part Seven
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When young Crouch died a year after arriving in the prison, Myklos went to the boy's cell to salvage anything useful. "I not know he so small," he remarked to Sirius later.
"He wasn't that small," said Sirius. "Not much shorter than me."
"Very small feet then," said Myklos showing Sirius the shoes he had salvaged.
No one came for young Crouch's body, and the next day the Dementors carried it outside into the howling wind.
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In Azkaban, the passing of the seasons was barely perceptible. It was always cold, always damp and the sun rarely broke through the cloud. Only the lengthening of the days was different. The greatest enemy was boredom.
Myklos leaned back against his cell wall with his arms folded and admired the fine, thin lines of Sirius's prone body. "Why you wish to mark yourself like that?"
The tattooist sliced delicately with one of Ceorfan's finest blades sucking in a sharp, annoyed breath as Sirius shrugged. "Because I can?"
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The tattooist was talented, no doubt about that. Before Azkaban, he had been much in demand as a portraitist for some of the wealthier families. But his inability to keep his fingers out of drawers and desks and purses had landed him in prison. "You know what it's like," he had said once at the gaming table, when someone had asked him why he had thrown away his chances, "when you never had enough to eat?"
Sirius scarcely twitched as the ash and soot Myklos had gathered from the kitchen fires was rubbed into the lines and dots scored into his skin.
The patterns on Sirius's back and chest and neck had a particular elegance and never quite lost the taste of smoke.
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Part Nine
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Ministry inspections were infrequent, hurried, superficial affairs which usually coincided with changes in the administration or Wizengamot. On these occasions, it was customary for the visiting Minister to distribute a selection of newspapers among the prisoners. So it was that four years after his incarceration, and following a thirty-five-minute visit from Minister Bagnold, Sirius read about his mother's demise in the obituary section of a fortnight old Prophet.
"So the old bat finally pegged it." He squinted against the smoke from the cigarette that hung in the corner of his mouth. "Wonder what'll happen to that miserable rabbit warren of a house now. Daresay it'll disintegrate without her there."
"She your mother, Sirius!"
"Oh yeah," Sirius sneered. "I'd forgotten." He turned the newspaper over. "Where's the crossword?"
Myklos could not understand this. His memories of his own mother were faint; a tired woman in an apron who smelled of newly baked bread, but one whose smile was only for him and whose memory brought a lump to his throat.
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Part Ten
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In Sirius's twelfth year in Azkaban, the hours of daylight were still growing longer when a new prisoner arrived. A dark, bearded man, Myklos was sure must be part giant. His proportions fit the spaces of the prison better than the humans who were dwarfed by the vast building.
As the huge man was escorted down the corridor, Sirius, face alight with joy, rushed to his door. "Hagrid! Old friend!"
The giant stopped and stared at Sirius for a few seconds, his black eyes hard and unforgiving, then he turned away in silence and did not look at Sirius again.
That night Sirius smashed his fists into Myklos's cell wall until they bled. "He thinks I did those things! He thinks I betrayed James and Lily to Voldemort. They all do. I thought they were my friends!"
"Sirius." Myklos stroked the long, matted hair. "You can trust only yourself."
"And you," Sirius said resting his forehead on Myklos's. "I trust you."
"And me," Myklos agreed. "You can trust me."
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The days had passed the midpoint of the year and started to shorten once more, when a couple of grim-faced Aurors came to take the giant away. Sirius did not speak of him again. But soon after, Minister Fudge, accompanied by a handful of tense and uncomfortable Ministry officials, came to make a perfunctory inspection of the prison. Myklos had no interest in politics, but inspections usually indicated a degree of instability within the Ministry. Possibly Fudge wished to demonstrate the Ministry's competence. Temporarily banished from inside the prison, the Dementors spiralled slowly outside; wisps of darkness high above the moving sea.
For some reason, Fudge paused uneasily outside Sirius's isolated cell.
"Got any crosswords?" asked Sirius with a feral smile.
Hurriedly, Fudge thrust a bundle of newspapers through the bar. "Crosswords. Very good!" he said with forced jollity. "Current affairs, what? Keep up the good work," He beamed insincerely at everyone and disapparated. The visit had taken no more than half an hour.
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Sirius consumed the newspapers avidly by the light of a dim and smelly fish oil lamp until he reached the last one. "Pettigrew!" he cried out in grief and pain and impotent fury. "Treacherous bastard!" He crept into a window recess and stared out over the crashing sea. "Harry," he whispered. "Harry. I promised to take care of you and I have failed over and over."
He stared all day and evening and into the night. "Look," he said pointing.
Myklos crawled in and lay half beside, half on top of Sirius, peering out into the darkness. "What is it?"
"Shush. There," said Sirius. "Did you see? And again!"
"The light, you mean? I see it before sometimes."
"I think it's the Flamborough lighthouse," said Sirius. "The sea is not so rough beyond the rocks, especially when the tide is going out. If I could get out to the rocks, I could swim to the lighthouse from there."
"What you do then?"
"Seek out the rat. Kill him. Avenge my friends."
Myklos understood the importance of vengeance. He hesitated, watching the faint light on the horizon as it flashed on and off. At last, he wriggled out of the narrow recess and stood up stiffly. "I show you something. Follow me."
"Where are we going?"
"Quiet. Dementors not far away." When he turned to look at Sirius, a skinny black dog was sniffing the floor behind him. He led the way down a dark staircase in a disused wing of the prison where strange fungus crept like phosphorescent yellow veins over the masonry.
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Once the kitchens had been extensive, with four chambers and half a dozen fireplaces. Now a single hearth sufficed to cook the charred griddle cakes made of coarse flour and salt water that passed for bread and boil vast cauldrons of watery soup. Grease had congealed in in a thick grey layer on the cold broth.
Fat beetles scuttled away into the crevices around the hearth while several indifferent rats rummaged in a pile of bones and rotting turnips. In a flurry, the dog pounced and a few seconds later dropped a rat at Myklos's feet.
"I not that hungry." Myklos nudged the rat away with his toe and reached up inside the chimney of a disused fireplace.
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Part Eleven
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Sirius held the Huon pine broomstick as if it was made of sugar. Myklos did not offer him the other, keeping it partly hidden under his arm.
"You never told me about these."
"You never talk about escape before."
Sirius looked surprised. "I don't suppose I did. Now we really can get away!"
"The brooms not go far," Myklos pointed out. "Bristles loose, and repair not strong."
"They will get us to the rocks. We can swim from there."
"I am not good swimmer, Sirius."
"But I'm a great swimmer! I'll help you. Come with me, Myk. I'm rich, you know. Uncle Alf left me a place in France. Well hidden. No one would find us there."
"You do that for me?"
"Of course I would."
For a short while, Myklos allowed himself this fantasy. A soft bed, clean sheets, fresh clothes. Hot food. A bath. "Very well." He would not argue practicalities. He knew what needed to be done. He stowed the brooms back inside the chimney, and as they waited for dusk, they drank Dolohov's vodka from small bone dice cups and toasted escape.
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A sunset they stood side by side on top of the high rampart.
"Ready, Myk?" Sirius readied the Huon pine broomstick.
Myklos smiled sadly, then closed his hand on the shaft of the oak broom and squeezed. It disintegrated as if made of damp sand.
"Myk! No!" Sirius tried to catch the remains of the broomstick but he was too late and it fell, bouncing end over end into the shadows. "What have you done?"
Myklos brushed damp sawdust from his hands. "Broom useless. Rotten. It not carry anyone."
"We can both go on this one then." Sirius rapped the end of the broomstick against the stone. "It's still solid, it will carry two."
"We would not make it." Myklos touched Sirius's cheek. "I not swim so far. I drag you down. Go. Find the Wormtail."
"But—" Sirius shook his head wildly. "I can't do this on my own!"
"You can. You must be brave."
"Myk—" Sirius took Myklos in his arms. Myklos felt the heat of him, the strength, the energy: and doubted he would ever know those things again.
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Part Twelve
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Sirius's face was a white spot in the dusk as he turned to look back at the prison. Away in the dark distance, the lighthouse flickered. Myklos clenched his fist and slapped it against his chest in salute. He couldn't see Sirius's features but knew he was grinning as the figure balancing confidently on the rocks mirrored the action. Then Sirius was gone and Myklos gasped, fearing he had fallen into the sea. But no, the dog was there, almost indistinguishable among the clumps of seaweed. An ululating howl trembled in the wind.
Myklos's vision was too blurred to see as the hound slipped into the waves.
It was likely to be two or three days before Sirius's absence was discovered. Maybe a part of the broomstick, unrecognisable without any bristles, would wash up on to the rocks. There would be a week or two of rabid dementor activity. The few human warders would be more sullen and brutal than usual. Rotas would be followed religiously and registers taken several times a day. The governor (who Myklos had never seen and doubted the existence of) would resign again. Within a month everything would be back to normal.
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Myklos had never been brave; had never needed to be, for he had never feared anything. Now he feared the months and years that he would spend within those damp, crumbling walls without Sirius beside him. Already, Azkaban was part of Sirius's past. Something he would not choose to remember.
He had left little behind for there was little to leave. Just one and a half cigarettes and a single Muggle match.
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As dawn broke, Myklos stood looking out over the sea; staring as if he might see the tiny speck of a wet black head down there somewhere in the grey waves. But he saw nothing. In the distance, the mainland was a darker cloud low on the horizon.
Sheltering his hand behind a pillar, Myklos struck the match and lit the full cigarette, sucking on it deeply, feeling the smoke warm and heavy in his lungs. The half-smoked cigarette—the one that had recently felt the pull of Sirius's lips—he put carefully into a little pocket he had made inside his thin Azkaban robes. Just above his heart.
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