A/N: Not mine, clearly. All characters belong to Rowling and I'm just playing with them for a while. This is a Hermione/Sirius story, legal-age Hermione o'course. Set a few years after the last book, canon use of the last book is iffy.
Prologue: Somewhere
It felt like dreaming, but he knew sometimes that he'd been dreaming too long. He felt heavy and light, far too big and completely miniscule. He was pretty sure he could go anywhere but knew he was also quite tightly confined. He was surrounded in black, or white, or maybe every color at once. He knew with certainty that he wasn't alone – he heard them, they whispered, he never understood them, he never saw them, though they seemed quite close.
The hardest part was remembering who he was.
Something, something, something. Something Black, like this nothing he swam or floated or maybe stayed perfectly still in while it whirled around him. A star, he was a star, a Howl, a Moon, Star-Dog, Dogstar, Sirius, Sirius Black. It always felt so good to remember, and he opened his eyes, and it felt like the first time in 100 years, and somewhere in the nothingness was a pinprick of light, another star like him, and he felt like running and he didn't know how to move but somehow he was hurtling toward it.
It grew until the white was blinding.