DISCLAIMER: HARRY AND HIS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES DO NOT BELONG TO ME! THEY BELONG TO THE AMAZING J.K ROWLING! ONLY THE PLOT IS MINE!

A/N: This takes place at the start of the Christmas holidays, OotP. Does not follow HBP or DH timelines.

Harry Potter and the Black Legacy

Chapter 1—A Siriusly Reckless Plan

"To Harry Potter, without whom I would be not sitting here today." Arthur Weasley raised his glass of wine. "Harry."

"Harry." The rest of the Weasleys and Hermione murmured, raising their glasses in unison.

"Harry." Another voice came from behind where Harry was standing. He turned, and a smile worked its way onto Harry's worn face. Sirius Black raised his own glass of wine and winked at Harry before downing it in one gulp.

"Sirius." Harry said, taking large strides forward to hug his Godfather. Sirius chuckled and hugged Harry back.

"Missed me, kiddo?" Sirius asked, ruffling Harry's hair. The boy didn't even try to stop him, showing just how much he appreciated Sirius.

"Yeah." Harry said, stepping away.

"Come on, let's leave them alone for a bit." Sirius gestured. Hermione looked at Harry apologetically as Ron talked to her animatedly, hands flying around as he expressed himself freely. Harry gave her a tired grin and nodded, following Sirius out of the room. They walked down the rickety old stairs to a room with a large green tapestry sewn onto the walls. Sirius closed the door after they both walked in.

"This is the Black family tree." He said, looking around. "I used to be on there too." He pointed to a blackened spot. "My mother blasted me off when I ran away." He glanced at Harry. "Charming woman." He added.

"This is your house?" Harry asked in surprise. Sirius looked around again.

"Yes, I suppose it could be called my house. My mother wanted to disown me totally, but my father left me the place, not that I wanted it, though. I offered it to Dumbledore as Headquarters. About the only useful thing I've done to the Order." Sirius said. Harry walked around the tapestry, surprised to see the names Bellatrix Lestrange, Narcissa Malfoy, and Draco Malfoy on the walls.

"You're related to Bellatrix Lestrange and Narcissa Malfoy?" Harry asked. Sirius' expression morphed into something akin to pain and regret before he put a disgusted face on.

"Yes. My deranged cousin. Dear Bella." He said, although his words lacked the real venom that was supposed to be there. "And you've met Narcissa and her son Draco, surely." He asked.

"You mean that Malfoy git? Yeah." Harry nodded. "And I've seen Narcissa Malfoy at the Quidditch World Cup with Lucius Malfoy and Draco." Harry added.

"Yes, the Malfoy family. Snobbish lot, from what I can remember." Sirius cast a glance at Harry again. "But we're not here to talk about the Malfoys, are we? Tell me about your vision, Harry." Sirius coaxed gently. "Tell me, and I'll listen. I'll help." He said.

"I…Sirius…when I…when I was seeing the vision…I wasn't…seeing it as me, or a bystander, or even Mr. Weasley. I…I was the snake." Harry said shakily. "This connection between me and Voldemort... what if the reason for it is that I am becoming more like him? I just feel so angry, all the time. What if after everything that I've been through, something's gone wrong inside me? What if I'm becoming bad?" He asked frustratedly, but at the same time scared of Sirius' reaction. Sirius sighed and knelt down, looking up at Harry, his hands on Harry's shoulders.

"I want you to listen to me very carefully, Harry. You're not a bad person. You're a very good person, who…bad things have happened to. Besides, the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters. We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are." Sirius said firmly, looking into Harry's confused green eyes.

"Thanks Sirius…" Harry looked down. Sirius gave him a reassuring smile and stood up. "I have a question, though." He asked.

"Anything, Harry, ask away." Sirius said.

"If we all have light and dark within us…then how was it possible for you to embrace the light? I mean…your cousins, they are your cousins, right?" Harry asked, looking at the family tree again.

"Yes." Sirius answered tersely.

"How come they couldn't…you know, act on the light side of them?" Harry asked. Sirius hesitated, then conjured up two chairs.

"Sit, Harry. I think this is going to take quite a while to get out." Sirius sighed. Harry sat down. Sirius lay back into his armchair.

"You must understand, Harry, that growing up in a pureblood family like mine wasn't by any way easy." Sirius said, eyes looking haunted by the past, gaunt, and broken, despite his healthier appearance and top-notch robes. "It was especially difficult as at the time, Voldemort was on the move, rising and taking over the Wizarding World slowly, bit by bit. I had a brother. His name was Regulus. Regulus Arcturus Black." Sirius said in a grief-stricken tone. Harry noticed the past tense and decided not to dig any further, as Regulus must be dead. "I also had, and still have, three cousins." Sirius continued. At Harry's surprised expression, he elaborated. "Yes, three cousins. See the other blackened patch there?" Sirius pointed at a spot between Bellatrix and Narcissa. "That was Andromeda, the middle child of my aunt and uncle. She was disowned for marrying a Muggleborn, Ted Tonks." Sirius grinned faintly.

"Tonks! As in…well, Tonks?" Harry asked incredulously.

"Yes, dear Nymphadora." Sirius said. "She's Andromeda's daughter with Ted Tonks. That goes back to your question about light and darkness within us. She chose to act upon the light within her, thus getting herself disowned, although she was in Slytherin. I suspect she must have begged or threatened the Hat not to put her in another house. She would have done well in Ravenclaw, too, with the amount of books she read." Sirius reminisced. "Anyway, she was the odd one out of the three, just as I was the more rebellious one of the two of us." Naturally Sirius meant him and Regulus. "There's the youngest of my cousins, Narcissa Black, now Malfoy." He said. "She was always the prim one, the lady, obeying the rules, a miniature version of my perfect aunt. However, she had her moments." Sirius said. "Needless to say I didn't like her all that much, not as much as I liked Bella, really." He said.

"Sorry, but what? Bellatrix was your favourite cousin?" Harry asked incredulously. "From what I've heard and seen, she's…well, insane and not a pretty sight after Azkaban." Harry said.

"I know, Harry, but she wasn't always like this." Sirius said, eyes faraway again. "She was my favourite cousin, I don't deny it. She was fun, and loved rule-breaking just like me. We used to execute our pranks together. She was a bright young girl. We usually flew outside or played together outside. We did almost everything together. She loved adventures and we shared our deepest secrets." He looked at Harry. "I know it's unbelievable, but I know her better than anyone else, Harry." Sirius looked into Harry's eyes again, and Harry could see the sincerity and pain in them. Harry nodded.

"I believe you." He said. Sirius relaxed and smiled.

"Thank you." He said softly. There was a pause where Harry opened his mouth, then closed it. Sirius saw this.

"I suppose you're wondering when she changed, when we grew apart, and how come she didn't get sorted into Gryffindor with a personality like hers?" Sirius asked with a small, sad smile.

"Yeah." Harry said, wondering how Sirius knew what he was thinking.

"Your expressions are quite obvious." Sirius chuckled. Harry scowled.

"And I'm supposed to be learning Occlumency…" He grumbled.

"Oh, don't worry. Snape's just being a slimy git." Sirius waved his hand airily. "There are Occlumency books in the library. Only I can access it, or anyone with Black blood, or the Black heir, whether by blood or not." Sirius smiled. "So you can enter, because I've named you as my Heir in my will." Sirius said.

"Sirius, you're not going to die anytime soon." Harry said in a determined voice. Sirius' smile turned sad.

"We never know, Harry. We never know. One day you may be talking to him, getting angry at him, and the next day you hear that he's dead." Sirius said, and Harry could tell that he was no longer directly talking to Harry. "Now back to your question." He said briskly, snapping out of his semi-trance, and Harry swore he could see tears in Sirius' grey eyes before they vanished. "Bellatrix could have been in Gryffindor, I know. She did take a rather extraordinarily long time to Sort, like me. We were both Hatstalls, which means we took more than five minutes to get Sorted." Sirius explained.

"I did, too." Harry said.

"Then you're a Hatstall, congrats!" Sirius grinned, then it faded as he started talking again. "Bella confided in me that she pleaded with the Hat to put her in Slytherin…"

Harry was struck by the irony of the situation. He had done the same thing to the hat, but pleading to be in Gryffindor instead of Slytherin.

"…uncle Cygnus would beat her up and none of us could have done anything about that." Sirius said in a grim tone. Harry deduced that Sirius meant that if Bellatrix had been sorted into Gryffindor, then her father Cygnus Black would have beaten her. Right. Harry blinked.

"What about you, then? Weren't you…beaten?" Harry asked tentatively.

"My father was a bit more lenient, I guess. He was detached most of the times." Sirius shrugged. "I was luckier, but Bella was not. Ever since her sorting into the Slytherin house, she's been slipping away from me, and into the abyss of dark magic. Finally she began to hang out with Lucius Malfoy, Rodolphus Lestrange, and the lot now known as Death Eaters." He said. "That's when I lost her, but the time when I truly lost her was after her wedding. She just stopped being Bella, and started being Bellatrix Lestrange. The next time I saw her was in Azkaban." Sirius said hoarsely, and this time he didn't hide his tears.

"It was an arranged marriage, I take it?" Harry asked, having heard the statement somewhere.

"Yes. Pureblood politics of linking families together and such." Sirius said bitterly.

"I'm sorry." Harry was at loss of words.

"Don't be. It's nobody's fault except for Voldemort." Sirius said, lips twitching up grimly.

"That's true. I'm still sorry." Harry said with a soft smile. "Tell me about your other relatives?" He asked tentatively. Sirius looked at the tapestry.

"Let's start with my brother." He muttered. "Regulus had always been a meek kid, I guess, so it wasn't really a surprise when he joined Voldemort. Mother and Father probably put a lot of pressure on him. We were sort of like polar opposites, coming from the same womb, so it was quite surprising when I got into Gryffindor. Obviously he was Slytherin. He played Seeker for their team while I did Beater for the Gryffindors. He was friends with Snape." Sirius made a face. "Always doing the thing that I don't." He chuckled. "Delving into the Dark Arts, entering into a respectable marriage, being a prude…" He laughed this time, and Harry grinned.

"All this changed, I guess, when I ran away." Sirius looked guilty. "He got too much expectation on his shoulders, I guess, and he just went with the flow. I expect Bella helped him into joining the Death Eaters." Sirius said.

"What about Andromeda? Was she kind of like you as well? Running away?" Harry asked.

"Well, yeah. She was older than me, so you could say I ran away like her, and not the other way around." Sirius said. "She despised Ted Tonks, actually, from what I learnt. For the first five years of them being in Hogwarts Andie hexed his balls off everytime she saw him. Ted was infatuated with her, but scared of her name and reputation and of course, the over-protective Bella."

Harry could see Sirius' eyes mist over. He didn't think that Sirius realized he was smiling.

"Something changed, though, in their sixth year. It might have been Bella graduating…or me going to Hogwarts, but she and Ted started going out secretly, and she told me. I kept her secret until she ran away at eighteen, already pregnant." Sirius laughed. "Hard to imagine the Slytherin swot and prude pregnant before anyone else, really."

"Kinda like Hermione, though I'd have a heart attack if she got pregnant." Harry smirked.

"She's better off than Andie." Sirius smirked back. "When the family found out they threatened to drag her back and torture Ted, but she stood defiant. I still don't know how they found out about me knowing, but they did, and my crazy batty dear mum beat the hell outta me." Sirius frowned.

"At age…thirteen?" Harry asked.

"You did amazing things back then, Harry. You shouldn't really be talking." Sirius chuckled. "But yes, when I was thirteen. That's when the hatred really settled in, I guess. Now about Narcissa. They were anxious to secure a good and respectable marriage for Narcissa after Andie's scandal, so they married Cissy to Malfoy at the summer after her sixth year. By that time Bella was actually still single and the most eligible girl in the whole of wizarding Britain, at twenty. My aunt and uncle knew that she was fiery and untameable, and arranged a marriage between her and the big bloke—Rodolphus Lestrange. Decent enough, I thought at first. However, that year was when I truly lost her. Never really had respect for Lestrange, and that destroyed whatever mild good feelings I had of him. I was turning fourteen, and back then I didn't know I would run away, but when I started hearing rumours about Voldemort truly rising, I packed and scrammed to your dad's house. I was sixteen. Your grandmother—Dorea Potter, was a relative. She was born as a Black. She…took care of me, mostly. Charlus Potter, your grandfather, was nice and all, but I don't think he trusted me, the heir—yes, I wasn't disowned totally—to the Black family." Sirius explained. "When I returned for my seventh year, everyone in Slytherin…well, Bella, Cissa, Regulus…they changed. I know part of it was my fault, but honestly, I thought they wouldn't have changed that much. Bella acted like she didn't know me at all, Cissy became the Ice Queen, and Regulus antagonized me." Sirius said sadly. Harry remained silent.

"Aside from that…well, in seventh year I changed to more carefree and I became an official womanizer." Sirius chuckled weakly. Harry could tell that he was still affected by his past. Usually Sirius would laugh in a more boisterous way at his own jokes and stuff. "I started to antagonize the Slytherins more as well. A sort of a war broke out inside Hogwarts. When we graduated, the war was starting. We joined the Order, fresh out of Hogwarts, and I just knew Bella and Regulus joined the Death Eaters, and even though Cissy was just Lucius' trophy wife, she was the more cunning of the two." He sighed. "It was so hard fighting against family." He continued. Harry didn't know how it felt, having no family of his own. The Dursleys didn't really count, and he doesn't duel his own friends and family, of course.

"There were minor battles—skirmishes here and there. I fought against Bella most of the time. She was erratic, unpredictable. I was the only one skilled enough to counter her."

"What about Dumbledore and Mad-Eye?" Harry asked. Sirius looked at him.

"Well, you really haven't seen how good of a dueler Bella is." He said seriously. Harry was shocked.

"No way. Even Voldemort fears Dumbledore. How can he not manage to outduel her?" He asked curiously.

"The Black family…has many secrets." Sirius smiled mysteriously. Harry was intrigued.

"Like…?" He prompted.

"They wouldn't be secrets if I told you, would they, now?" Sirius said slyly. Harry swore that Sirius was a Slytherin soul with a Gryffindor heart.

"So…if we met her in battle…" Harry said slowly.

"Even Mad-Eye'd be hard-pressed." Sirius said, nodding at the implications behind Harry's words.

"But she's in Azkaban." Harry reassured himself.

"Not for long." Sirius said grimly. Harry jerked up in surprise.

"Why? How?"

"Do you really think Voldemort would leave his most fanatic servants stuck in Azkaban?" Sirius asked.

"No…" Harry whispered.

"Exactly. I suspect he's going to act soon." Sirius said.

"Then how are we going to…?" Harry said in panic.

"I have a reckless plan." Sirius whispered, leaning in. "It'll only require the breaking out of one person—Bellatrix."

"Why would you free her? She's a fanatic servant and totally devoted! She tortured Neville's parents into insanity!" Harry said in horror.

"As I said, secrets." Sirius tapped his nose. "I just need a bit of luck." He said.

"Luck?" Harry asked.

"That's right." Sirius smirked. "Have you ever heard of liquid luck?" He asked.

"No. What is it?" Harry asked eagerly. "It sounds brilliant!"

"It's more than brilliant. It's called Felix Felicis. It's a potion which is gold-coloured and extremely hard to brew. Brew it wrong and the results would be disastrous. It takes six months to brew. One gulp and you've got a whole day's worth of luck." Sirius said. "However, an overdose would cause giddiness, recklessness, and dangerous overconfidence." He said.

"How do you know all this?" Harry asked in wonder.

"I didn't have Snape as a teacher." Sirius smirked again. Harry nodded, seeing his point.

"The man's brilliant but snarky as hell, though. Plus he hates me." Harry mused.

"Mm." Sirius said. "I have to agree."

"So…about the plan…" Harry said.

"About the plan." Sirius nodded. "In the secret Black family stash—"

"What does it have?" Harry asked inquisitively.

"Deadly potions, weapons, wands, eggs, ingredients, dark artefacts, and basically what's illegal and dangerous." Sirius said brightly.

"Wow. How come nobody else knows of it?" Harry asked.

"I can only divulge it to those of pure Black blood, and heirs. In this case you're my heir, hence me being able to tell you." Sirius said.

"That's handy." Harry said, amazed.

"It's the pureblood way of keeping secrets in the family." Sirius shrugged. Harry suddenly felt small. He didn't know many things about the Wizarding World and was rushing into it headfirst, trying to fight a war which had a madman leading the other side with bloodthirsty lunatics under his command. Said madman almost won the first time as well, against trained witches and wizards. What's to say this time he wouldn't be able to wipe out a bunch of teenagers and the old crowd?

"Harry?" Sirius asked. Harry blinked.

"Sorry, just thinking." He apologized. "Go on? What about the plan?"

"As I said, we will take two vials of Felix Felicis with us, one on each of us, and we break into Azkaban. Pretty simple, eh?" Sirius asked. Harry paled.

"You want us to break into Azkaban and get out without being arrested?" Harry gaped.

"Yep!" Sirius said, smiling. "How's that?"

"That's STUPID!" Harry stood up angrily. "Sirius, you can't go around throwing your life away like that!"

"Says the one who's going with me." Sirius pushed Harry back into his chair. "Listen, Felix Felicis is a very powerful potion, Harry. If you ingest it, you will feel as if nothing will go wrong—and nothing will go wrong while it's still in effect." Sirius reassured Harry.

"But…are you sure?" Harry asked doubtfully.

"Not exactly. First, I'll have to train you in Occlumency, Legilimency, swordsmanship, dueling, nonverbal and wandless magic, Black magic, telepathy, Animagus training, and advanced dark and light magic." Sirius said.

"What? Dark magic?" Harry practically screamed.

"Lower your voice, Harry!" Sirius exclaimed, throwing up privacy barriers. "And yes, dark magics. You don't need to use them, trust me. However, understanding them is vital for your survival against the dark side in a war." Sirius said.

"But…how are we going to have the time for it?" Harry asked anxiously.

"Secrets, secrets." Sirius winked. "But you'll have to swear to secrecy first. It's not that I don't trust you." He held his hands up quickly at Harry's hurt expression. "It's just that it's not safe to let this get out, agreed?" He raised an eyebrow.

"I suppose not." Harry said reluctantly.

"So repeat after me—I, Harry James Potter, swear on my mind, body, heart, magic, and soul not to tell anyone else what Sirius Orion Black has told me in the past hour." Sirius said clearly.

"I, Harry James Potter, swear on my mind, body, heart, magic, and soul not to tell anyone else what Sirius Orion Black has told me in the past hour." Harry repeated.

"Good. Add a 'so mote it be' in the end." Sirius said.

"So mote it be." Harry repeated. A bright flash illuminated the room, and Harry felt a squeezing sensation that went away as fast as it had come.

"Alright, it's done." Sirius lowered the privacy wards. They stood up and Sirius banished the chairs.

"So what now?" Harry asked.

"Now, we wait." Sirius said. "Have a good night's rest, and tomorrow I'll show you the trunk." Sirius said, giving Harry a fatherly hug.

"The trunk?" Harry asked.

"The trunk." Sirius confirmed. "Tomorrow." He said sternly. As if on cue, Hermione peeked into the doorway.

"Harry, let's go upstairs." Hermione said. Sirius patted Harry on the back gently and let him go. As soon as the teenagers went up, he stepped out of the room and looked back. His eyes lingered over Bellatrix, Andromeda, Narcissa, and Regulus' places on the tapestry. Finally he closed the door.

"So it starts." He murmured.

Well, reviews please! Yeah, I know, starting this one when the other isn't finished yet, but this is just a taster. I want to see what you guys think about it first. Constructive criticism wanted but NO FLAMES!

I know this plot's been done before, but I want to twist some other things together. If you see something very similar to other fanfics, it probably is from the other fics. All credit goes to the other authors, though. It's just that so many things have already been used! So don't flame me...XP