Sirius had thought, when the new Minister had declared him 'cleared of all charges', that he would be let lose to find his way back to his apartment and sort out his life on his own, although he thought it likely that the Weasleys would help him. It turned out that the Ministry wasn't that cruel... or that kind.

No, as someone just released after spending more than six months of Azkaban Sirius was required to submit to a mental evaluation at St. Mungo's to determine whether or not he was fit to rejoin society. The answer had been a resounding 'no'. When Sirius had insisted that he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, one of the healers had taken it as a sign that he needed to be restrained.

For a place dedicated to caring for the sick, St. Mungo's had an awful lot of similarities to Azkaban. Sirius was locked in a small, windowless room – it was roughly twice the size of his old cell, if Sirius had had the energy to pace – with nothing to do and no human companionship. To make matters worse, the Healers were prone to showing up at odd hours and Sirius didn't dare settle his nerves by spending time as Padfoot. The last thing he needed was to get thrown back in Azkaban for being an unregistered Animagus.

Because, dreadfully boring as it was, there were no dementors at St. Mungo's. The food was probably better than Azkaban's too, and Healer Shacklebolt had offered to bring him some books when she finished her shift.

Sirius really should have tried to sleep for a bit. Sleeping would probably make him feel better and when he woke up Healer Shacklebolt might have left the books. Or supper. Or Remus might have come to visit him. The Healers had asked him if he wanted them to contact anyone and he had said Remus and they had said that they'd send him a letter.

The letter should have reached Remus already. Sirius's sense of time was still a little bit off, but he very sure that he had been here for at least ten hours and that was plenty of time for an owl to send a letter wasn't it?

"Oh, no it's standard policy," a voice said from somewhere outside Sirius's room. Sirius thought it belonged to Healer Shacklebolt, but the echoes threw him off a bit. "The hospital isn't really a very good place to treat prolonged demetor exposure, especially for someone who doesn't want to be treated."

"I can imagine," another voice said. It was a man's, vaguely familiar even though Sirius couldn't place it. Was it Remus's? Had it been long enough that his voice had changed, or had Sirius's memory deteriorated so much that he couldn't recognize one of his oldest friends? His only oldest friend now, because James was dead and Peter was a traitor.

"I'm sure you know all about it," the first voice, Sirius was know sure that it was Healer Shacklebolt, said. "But at the same time we can't exactly let him loose, can we? The dementors – after so many years it's more that just depression. The poor dear doesn't have a job or a place to stay or anything. He's liable to camp out in an alley or something if left to his own devices."

"I don't think so," the second voice said. "He has a decent amount of gold in Gringotts and I think he would have the sense to take some out and rent a room at the Leaky Calderon if nothing else."

It was rather rude of them, Sirius thought, to sit outside his door and talk about him without coming in to see him.

"Perhaps," Healer Shacklebolt conceded. "He's doing remarkably well for someone who spent eight years constantly surrounded by dementors, but there's always a danger of relapse, especially in someone without much of a social circle." There was the jingle of keys in a lock, and the door to Sirius's cell opened. "Hello, Sirius," Healer Shacklebolt said with a sort of false cheeriness that had not been in her voice before. "Are you ready to leave St. Mungo's?"

"Yes," Sirius said. So it was Remus, here to take him home. The Healers had said things about 'responsible caretakers' and 'stable environments' and generally made it sound like they wouldn't let him leave the hospital with anyone who didn't have an Order of Merlin, but Remus had always been the one that could talk the teachers into things. He was a prefect, after all.

Healer Shacklebolt stepped out of the doorway, revealing an elderly man who resembled no one so much as Sirius's father. "You're not Remus," Sirius said.

Healer Shacklebolt sighed. "Sirius, darling, we only wrote to him three hours ago. He probably hasn't gotten your letter yet."

Three hours? That would make his time spent in this little room only an hour and a half rather than eight and a half hours. Forget recovering, if Sirius didn't get out of here soon he was going to go mad.

"This is your grandfather," Healer Shacklebolt continued. "You're going to stay with him for a few months, all right? That way you have someone to look after you while you get better."

Sirius could remember quite a lot about his family, in fact most of his memories seemed to take place when he was home from Hogwarts for the summer. Living with this grandfather, although Sirius had not memories of him in particular, was not likely to help him get better. "I don't want to go back to Grimmauld Place."

"We're not going to Grimmauld Place," the old man – Sirius refused to think of him as his grandfather – said. "I own a house in the country, we're going to stay there."

"Lots of sunlight," Healer Shacklebolt added. "Much better for a body than all this smog in London."

"Indeed," the man said. It was a bit bothersome, Sirius thought, not to know the man's name. It made him feel like that bloke from two cells over, the one who was always going on about people no one else could see. "Besides, it's far easier to avoid attracting the attention of muggles when you aren't surrounded by hordes of them."

"There's nothing wrong with muggles," Sirius said. He remembered that being the crux of all the trouble with his parents: their steadfast insistence that muggles were some kind of vermin lower than house elves.

"I was thinking of Statute of Secrecy concerns," the old man said without skipping a beat. Sirius could almost believe he meant it. "It's a bit difficult to play Quidditch or track thunderbird migration patterns when you have to avoid muggles finding out what you're doing."

Sirius did not answer.

"Not that I play Quidditch much these days," the man continued. "I wasn't much of flyer even when I was young and getting old has only given me an aversion to high speed acrobatics, but I'd imagine that you'd want the opportunity to fly. Regulus said you used to be quite the beater."

A look of confusion crossed Healer Shacklebolt's face.

"His brother, not mine," the old man said softly. "Do you remember Regulus, Sirius?"

"I don't like him," Sirius said. In his memories, Regulus had been little more than a puppet, parroting whatever Mother told him. It was hard to like someone like that. And yet, Sirius could remember being terribly upset when Regulus wouldn't leave with him.

Healer Shacklebolt adopted an expression appropriate to someone who had just swallowed a lemon. It was amusing enough to make Sirius laugh.

The only problem was that Sirius couldn't seem to stop laughing. He was vaguely aware that Healer's Shacklebolt's expression was not nearly funny enough to justify his reaction, but that didn't do anything to stop it.

Fortunately Healer Shacklebolt and the old man seemed determined to ignore Sirius's outburst. "You understand that he'll need to come back for weekly visits until Healer Abbot says otherwise. That's likely to be at least six months."

The old man, Sirius was almost tempted to ask his name, said, "I'll manage. Is that a new policy or is it just because of the dementor exposure?"

"Mostly it's because the Ministry is trying to put the best possible spin on this," Healer Shacklebolt said. "There's no way for them come out blameless, not when an innocent man spent eight and a half years surrounded by dementors because they couldn't be bothered to hold a trial for him, but paying for his medical care makes them look a bit better."

"So it's a cover-up," the old man said, "or an apology, although I am not particularly inclined to give the Ministry the benefit of the doubt at the moment. I suppose they'll have him readmitted if he skips his appointments."

"What are the appointments for?" Sirius asked. It was rather grating to sit and listen to two people talk as though it had already been decided that he was going home with one of them, even though neither of them had actually asked him what he wanted.

"To help you recover and make sure that Arcturus here is looking after you properly," Healer Shacklebolt answered.

Sirius did not need looking after, but as most of the Healers he had mentioned that to earlier had been condescending (at best) or argumentative (at worst) he thought it better not to point that out. "How are they going to help?" he asked. "Sitting in this room staring at nothing hasn't helped me at all so far."

Arcturus, no matter what Sirius had thought earlier he was not happy to have learned the man's name, chuckled. "He's got a point, Prosper."

"Prosperina, if you don't mind," Healer Shacklebolt said, without the slightest hint of annoyance. Sirius thought it rather strange that she was encouraging his grandfather to call her by her first name, as she did not look nearly old enough to be one of his schoolmates. And he could not remember the Shacklebolts being considered a member of the Black's social circle when he was a child.

"As you wish, Prosperina," Arcturus said. "Now, are these weekly visits going to do more than satisfy Healer Abbot's curiosity?"

"They'd make it obvious if you'd been mistreating Sirius," Healer Shacklebolt said, with the air of someone who had just scored a point in an argument rather than someone who really thought that Sirius needed to watched for signs of mistreatment.

"If he's cruel to me, I'll run away," Sirius declared, before realizing that he had made it sound as though he was perfectly willing to go live with Arcturus.

"Just make sure you have somewhere safe to run to," Healer Shacklebolt said. "I hate to think of you starving on the streets." Sirius figured that was a hint that, if anything bad should happen, he was supposed to come back to St. Mungo's.

"I can take care of myself," Sirius said, although there wasn't as much force behind his words as there had been earlier, when the Healers had first told him that they weren't going to let him leave the hospital by himself.

Both Arcturus and Healer Shacklebolt looked for a moment as though they wanted to contradict Sirius, but neither of them said anything.

"So what are all these appointments really for?" Sirius asked, after several seconds of the three of them staring at each other.

"They're to assess your mental health," Healer Shacklebolt said. "Prolonged expose to dementors can have some nasty side-effects and we want to make sure that you recover fully. We wouldn't want you to feel fine and then sink into depression two weeks down the road."

"Is that something that normally happens?" Arcturus asked. "I would think that having the dementors gone would make someone feel a lot better overall."

"It does for the first while," Healer Shacklebolt said, "when people are just glad not to be stuck in Azkaban any longer, but then they get out and can't get back into their old lives. Also, all that time with only their worst memories seems to make people forget that the good times ever happened."

Sirius felt a twinge of something at that remark. He had been very glad to be out of Azkaban and then his good mood had been spoiled by the discovery that he was going to be trapped in St. Mungo's for an indefinite period of time. "Right," he said. "The appointments are important and I should come to them. Anything else?"

"There's nothing else," Healer Shacklebolt said. "If you're ready to go..."

"Very ready," Sirius said. He was not entirely sure about who he was leaving with, but if worse came to worse he could always turn into a dog and run off to Remus's. "As long as I don't have to visit Grimmauld Place." More specifically, as long as he didn't have to visit the people who lived there.

"You do know that your parents are dead, right?" Arcturus asked.

Healer Shacklebolt glared at him.

Arcturus shrugged. "He's going to find out eventually and I don't see the point in hiding it from him."

"I'm fine," Sirius said. He really was. His parents, especially his mother, had haunted his days in Azkaban and it was more of a relief than anything else to know that there wasn't the slightest chance of running into them.

Healer Shacklebolt did not look at all convinced. "They're your parents, dearie. It's all right for you to be upset by their deaths. Healthy, even. Bottling up your emotions–"

"I'm not bottling up any emotions," Sirius said, far more harshly than he had meant to. "I haven't spoken to my parents since I ran away from home when I was sixteen, why should I be upset to learn that they're dead?"

"Regulus is dead too," Arcturus said. "He died about a year before you were incarcerated."

That was far more of a shock than his parents' deaths. "He was seventeen," Sirius said. "Sure, he had–" Sirius broke off, realizing that it might not be the best idea for him to tell Healer Shacklebolt, someone that he hardly knew at all, that his brother had been a Death Eater. Even if Regulus was dead and couldn't be arrested any more. "How?"

"I don't know," Arcturus said. "He left Grimmauld Place on an errand near the end of August and two days later the tapestry recorded his death. I'm told that your mother was hysterical."

Mother's hysterics had been an ever increasing phenomenon during Sirius's years at school, so he could not be bothered to care much about them. "Where did they find him?"

"No one ever did," Arcturus said. "Wherever he went, it was far enough outside the area frequented by humans that, in ten years, no one has any idea where he went or how he died. Either that or whoever killed him did a much more thorough job hiding the body than was usual at the time."

Healer Shacklebolt cleared her throat, causing both Blacks to turn and look at her. "Perhaps this is a conversation that would best take place at home," she said.

"You're quite right, Prosperina," Arcturus said. "We can save any discussion of details until after Sirius is settled in."

"I don't want to get settled in first," Sirius said. "I want to know what happened to my brother. He didn't just go out for a walk and drop dead."

"You're taking this much worse than I thought you would," Arcturus said.

"All the more reason for it to wait a bit," Healer Shacklebolt said. It might have been Sirius's imagination, because there was not one thing about her that was anything but strictly professional, but she looked very uncomfortable.

"What if I don't want to go live with him?" Sirius asked. "You both keep assuming I will, but neither of you actually asked me."

Healer Shacklebolt looked absolutely dumbstruck, which probably made sense because Sirius had been so eager to leave the hospital and normal people liked their grandparents anyway.

"You don't have to stay with me if you don't want to," Arcturus said. His voice was weary, almost resigned, as though he had known all along that Sirius was not going to leave with him and had just being hoping he was wrong. "I thought it would be a good idea because I didn't know who else you would stay with and I did want to talk to you about Regulus and possibly getting into Grimmauld Place to look through his things."

"Couldn't you do that on your own?" Sirius asked. Grimmauld Place was the ancestral family home, as the oldest of the Blacks it should have belonged to Arcturus, or Sirius's other grandfather, now that he thought of it Arcturus hadn't said which side of Sirius's family he was on.

Arcturus sighed. "Do you remember the last time I fought with your parents. The one where your father kicked me out of the house and I told him he could keep it?"

Sirius suddenly found himself much more kindly disposed to the idea of living with his grandfather. Anyone who had fought with his parents had to have some redeeming qualities.

"You might have been too young for it," Arcturus continued. "You were only five at the time."

"It probably blended in with all the other shouting," Sirius said. There had been quite a lot of it, mainly from his mother but Sirius's father had occasionally gotten involved.

"Anyways. Your parents took me at my word. The next time I dropped in for a visit, I found myself unable to enter the building. I tried owling, but if Orion got any of my letters he never bothered to write me back."

"Why didn't you take the house back after he died?" Sirius asked.

"And turn my widowed daughter-in-law out of her home?" Arcturus shook his head. "Even if I needed that kind of scandal, I'm not cruel enough to do it. Besides, Regulus was alive then."

"And you didn't try after Moth- after she died?" Sirius knew he would have, if he had wanted to go through Regulus's things to see if he had left any hints as to where he was really going on the night he died, he wouldn't have waited for anyone to die first.

"I was in America, studying thunderbirds with Lucretia, when your mother died," Arcturus said. Sirius could vaguely remember his parents talking about Lucretia, the obsessive aunt who had apprenticed herself to a magizoologist straight out of O.W.L.s and moved to America to study thunderbirds at the first opportunity. "I didn't hear about her death for nearly sixth months, and when I finally managed to make it over to see about the house I was told that had been inherited by you and that, unless I wanted to get involved in a costly and unpopular lawsuit, I was best off waiting for you to die."

"And that's what you did," Sirius said. Any goodwill he had had towards the man had evaporated at the thought that he had spent the last several years hoping Sirius would die.

"It seemed like the best idea at the time," Arcturus said. "I could have sued you for possession of the house, but as any such lawsuit would require removing you from Azkaban for a number of months, it was likely to make me extremely unpopular."

"Because that's such a horrible thing to live with," Sirius said. Remus had always managed it without complaint, and he didn't have enough galleons to fill a swimming pool the way most of Sirius's family did.

"From what Regulus said, you were always very well-liked by most everyone who wasn't in Slytherin," Arcturus said. "I did consider pushing for you to be tried, but I did not think the Ministry would be convinced to acquit you without at least some evidence of your innocence and as I had none I thought it best to wait until evidence surfaced."

Sirius had only really picked up on one aspect of that statement. "You knew I was innocent. And you left me to rot in Azkaban!"

"I suspected you were innocent," Arcturus said, as calmly as though he were talking about the weather than his only remaining grandchild's imprisonment. "I could have insisted that you be tried, but without any evidence of your innocence, and with Barty Crouch running the DMLE, you would have been convicted, sentence to life imprisonment in Azkaban, and nothing but a signed confession from Peter Pettigrew would have gotten you out."

Healer Shacklebolt cleared her throat loudly. "I think all this is a bit too much excitement for one day. Arcturus, since Sirius isn't going to live with you–"

"I didn't say that," Sirius said, realizing that if he didn't he was liable to be trapped in her, alone, for a very long time. "I was upset, because you didn't ask me what I wanted."

Arcturus raised an eyebrow.

"If it doesn't work out, I can go stay with Remus later," Sirius said. Or rather, he could go stay with Remus as soon as he had milked the old man for ever bit of information concerning Regulus's death. Because Regulus had been an annoying, brown-nosing, snitch... but he had been Sirius's brother and it wasn't as though Sirius had something better to do with his time. "Can we leave now?"

Healer Shacklebolt did not appear entirely convinced by Sirius's statement, but she said, "Of course."


A/N: While I have used the Black Family Tree as a basis for the Blacks in this story, I have made a few adjustments in order to smooth out some inconsistencies between it and the books. Most importantly, I have Regulus (Sirius's brother) being born in 1963 and dying in 1980 at the age of seventeen.