I don't own Harry Potter and I make no profit out of writing this.

This story was updated and clarified in January 2016.

Thank you for reading.

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Chapter 1

A Stone House Above the Sea

Where Sirius and Ariana meet

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A simple stone house overlooked the sea, pale against the sky of winter cold.

Sirius Black was trapped inside the house. It's not supposed to be winter, he thought. It should have been the glorious month of June, just before summer school holidays, when he arrived. He drifted in semi-conscious state, glossy eyes barely mirrored in the small window glass high up on the wall, covered by ghastly dirt of many years.

He remembered his last conscious thought before falling into the Veil: This is as it should be. He could almost feel the caress of green light on his skin, still laughing, eyes slowly widening in shock.

When he opened his eyes again, he briefly considered his troubled and rather short life and found rapidly that he preferred it by far to a long life filled with all the happiness of this world where he would have never met his friends or given his life for his godson.

Only he didn't expect death to be just so… uneventful. Between cold stone walls, he stood on his toes to peer through a miniature rounded window covered with grime, wishing to get a glimpse of the outside. He was trying to see something, anything at all. There wasn't anything. There wasn't anyone. He was utterly and completely alone.

I'm imprisoned.

Again.

He examined the room he was in over and over again. The walls were died plain white, with masonry visible beyond paint on some places. The room was very small and empty except for an old Muggle painting depicting the birth of a baby at night with a heavy dark blue sky above the little boy and his parents. There was a bright star depicted high above the characters and a pair of winged beings playing musical instruments. The ominous dark blue of the sky dominated the painting occupying almost three quarters of the available surface, threatening to grow over all other figures and completely conquer the scenery.

Yet the family seemed at peace, unhinged by the rage of the elements around them. A small source of ephemeral light was illuminating the body of the child and the face of his mother, while father stood in the shadows, turning his ear to listen to the music from above.

Sirius studied the painting obsessively as there was nothing else to look at but it remained a beautiful, yet lifeless object to his eyes. He concluded there wasn't much fairness in death just as there wasn't any in life. The star vaguely reminded him of his namesake Sirius and of just how much he hated his name, another heirloom of his insane family where all known members have been named upon the stars.

He must have been here for a really long time. Already for a while, he noticed he was hungry. This should not matter in death, he mused, yet the hunger grew with every passing hour. Or was it days?

The magic of the room was wrong. Whenever he tried to use his wand to reveal something about his surroundings there were no results. Only strange jolts of light would come out of it whenever he approached the painting in his attempts. So he dropped the wand on the stone floor in front of the cursed image. What was once almost a part of his body, was now a useless tool.

At a certain point thirst became unbearable. His lips were getting thin and dry like old parchment half-eaten by Pixies. His sight blurred and he thought that through one of the walls of his small cell he could glimpse a human figure. The figure was ghostlike and it moved graciously at the edge of his vision. He stumbled to the wall, touched it, hit it with his fists and cried out in helpless rage.

Then he laughed like one possessed by all the demons of this world.

It took him some time to calm down and start pacing stubbornly around the room, examining it all over again: the walls, the painting, the window.

The walls, the painting, the window.

He repeated the routine countless times until in the end he could not walk. So he crawled.

The walls, the painting, the window.

When he could not move at all, he lay beaten on the ground. The ghost of his imagination was near him yet somewhere far away. He longed for blissful oblivion as his experience of death so far definitely didn't meet his expectations.

Imagine being cursed to death by your own cousin only to die once again from thirst!

Bellatrix, my dear, he mused, what are you up to now? Killing some more family members you don't approve of only to please your master? But you didn't get to Harry, did you? I took care of that.

He smiled and found himself hoping fervently that Voldemort would kill Bellatrix for her failure to bring him Harry. That would be fair just like Sirius's demise had been more than fitting for the last son of the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black. He was almost happy again looking at his situation from that perspective and decided to ignore his thirst. Yes, the accursed family name had died out with him as it should have happened long ago in order to pay for all the evil they had done or sponsored in the past. He found it appropriate that he should suffer in death for what had been done under the name he bore even if he renounced his family when he was only sixteen years old.

Knowing that he died rather than betrayed his friends brought him a good measure of self-fulfilment. Sirius always wanted to go down fighting since the war started and he couldn't help but hope that James would have been proud.

Yet he always expected he would see James and Lily Potter when he died. He would tell them how their son Harry, they Boy Who Lived, vanquished their murderer once and was about to do it again. He would ask them for forgiveness because he unwillingly caused their death.

Sirius almost felt sorry for Bellatrix who was surely going to lose her mentor murderer in the future. He had to give her one thing: dear Bellatrix was the best in her category of wizards and witches. She befriended only the evillest of all. And Voldemort qualified for that honourable title.

Had things gone differently in Sirius's life, would he personally embrace the darkness and the twisted greatness it seemed to offer? A deeply hidden part of him screamed for revenge power could bring for the twelve years of his life lost in Azkaban, the wizarding prison whose Dementor guardians had sucked out all happiness he possessed and very nearly consumed his soul. He was sentenced without trial, escaped, and had been on the run until he was finally hiding in his parents' house, back to his childhood cage, more horrible to his soul than any Dementor could ever be.

"Please, give me some water", he thought or perhaps he spoke, he could not be sure.

"I'm dying," he whispered. "Why can't I see Lily and James if we are all dead?"

Sirius closed his eyes and drifted slowly into his past. He was eleven again and saw for the first time the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The castle rose in his mind making his chest swell with emotion. Sirius smiled and passed out, only an inch away from well and truly dying.

He dreamed an odd song sung by childlike voices about his suffering and his regrets. The warm and loving family he never had and which he always imagined as a child and later as a notorious prisoner. The role of observer forced upon him in the second war against Voldemort and the maddening confinement in his parents' house. The war he wanted to lead in only to be among the first ones to fall. He stumbled under the burden of his biggest regret: his own role in James and Lily's death, recommending them as a keeper of their secret location Peter Pettigrew, the man who had then truly betrayed them to Voldemort.

Until one winter morning, when he could barely stir from exhaustion, a breeze came, a fragrance of freshness and growing things. He could not be sure that it was morning, yet the sensation was delicious and almost palpable, the first taste of coming spring. He would have performed a Memory Charm on himself to forget that feeling if he could still locate his wand but he was too week to search for it.

Sirius desired to return to numbness, for he could not bear to suffer yet another disappointment should this change mean nothing at all. He was sure that if he hadn't been insane before, as most of his family members were said to be, approximately a week after falling through the Veil, he was completely and utterly mad.

Against his better judgement, he started to hope. For what, he could not tell. And the scent was lingering.

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Ariana Dumbledore celebrated the 12th anniversary of living alone in a small stone house in the middle of nowhere surrounded only by the collection of her family old furniture and obsolete magical objects. Her late father had a passion for collecting beautiful useless items so she shared the already small space with paintings, mirrors, carpets, textiles, candle holders and jewels, some of them cursed long time ago but nowadays as innocent as a new born child. There was also a significant number of wizarding books, none of them state of the art but all of them teaching a bit here and a bit there about all kinds of magic.

Albus's old friend Gellert used a Portkey to transport her to her new home twelve years ago on Albus's bidding. Every now and then Gellert would bring her fresh food supplies and some more insignificant books to fill her time with. His visits disturbed her deeply. He would tell her how Albus kept promising (in vain, she always thought bitterly, all Albus's promises have been in vain) that he would find her a better place to stay one day, while Aberforth only scowled and glared at the injustice of her situation but could not sway Albus, who was her legal guardian, to help her.

She could not blame her brothers. It was not their fault that their sister was a lunatic and a freak who had to be kept away not to hurt somebody with uncontrolled magic. Sometimes she wished she was a real Squib. Or a Muggle. She would not wish upon anyone the horrible reality of not being able to summon her magic at will, nor to do anything with it. Except that her magic could come uncalled for and hurt people she loved.

She begged Albus to kill her after she had caused an explosion that accidentally killed their mother.

Ariana had been confined ever since, for a year in their family house in Godric's Hollow and then in the small stone house in the middle of somewhere. Ariana didn't know where she was and after twelve years she didn't care to find out.

Her brothers explained to her in the beginning that it was for her own good but she found that knowing and accepting what was for one's own good were two very different things.

Refusing to think about her life she decided to be happy on one more anniversary of her solitary imprisonment. At least here she could not hurt anybody. Sometimes she thought much more time had passed, almost a lifetime, but the dates from the newspapers Gellert would bring denied this assumption and she was silently afraid of going utterly mad. Her body has changed and she felt older, not old, not that old, but not a girl any more.

She looked at herself and straightened her heavy woollen winter robes in light grey colour with a pattern of scattered lemon yellow stars, a gift from her brother Aberforth for her 14th birthday when she was still free. Luckily she didn't grow much in height since then, only her hair had grown considerably and the braid she wore was so heavy that it caused her headaches.

Ariana released her hair from the tight grip of a black ebony hair pin. Reckless golden blond curls that gleamed orange in the sunlight fell over her shoulders and all over her back.

She improvised a cake from all kinds of food she had, from home-made biscuits and pieces of old bread smearing it over with the last remnants of raspberry jam she saved for that occasion. She wished she could conjure twelve candles, aware that she could blow herself up in the attempt to do it. So she closed her eyes and imagined them burning. She imagined herself in a pale orange dress in the garden of the family house where she lived as a child. Her parents and her brothers were there, beaming at her. In her mind she had a beautiful wand which she used to gracefully light the candles. Blowing the imaginary candles out, she wished in the back of the mind, subconsciously, that someone would come and take her away from her cell somewhere else, any place else, near or far, with the only condition that she had never seen it before.

She kept her eyes closed for a very long time. A breeze passed over her head carrying the scent of fresh herbs and the sea. There was no noise but she could still hear the movement of the waves gently washing the shore in the early morning. Her magic was running through her as a wild animal about to tear apart from the leash it had overgrown in time.

When she opened her eyes, her surroundings were changed. The room had become smaller, divided in two by a transparent wall. She approached the barrier and touched it. It felt smooth under her fingers yet firmer than brick and stone. She could not cross.

Wonderful, she thought attributing the change to her uncontrolled magic. I will crush myself with walls next time and be done with this.

And then, beyond the barrier, under the Muggle painting that Gellert found with a woman who was dying and offered it to her father some twenty years ago, she saw a man. An unnaturally white-faced man with bewildered grey eyes and black curly hair falling to his shoulders. He was wearing a dark coloured velvet coat as if he had just joined her after some social occasion for gentlemen but the rest of his attire was much less formal. She had never seen a wizard dressed like that. She had never seen clothes like he wore.

She was terrified and hid herself in a corner before he could see her, regretting that she had undone her hair. Memories of insistent hands tugging on her hair flooded her mind, drawing her closer to the point of suffocation, three pairs of young hands, then only one, one pair of thin bony arms.

After a while, curiosity was stronger than her fears and she realised what she had wished for. She understood that she wanted to lash out and kill herself with her magic somewhere in the open if that was indeed her destiny. Being buried alive was no longer acceptable, she could not stand it any more. Ariana tapped the barrier and waved to the man but there was no reaction.

It took her the rest of that day to realize that the man couldn't see her. She fell asleep on the floor leaning on the barrier between them, her mind puzzled and her body restless. She woke up stiff and no more intelligent as to what she should do.

For three long days she observed him.

He's odd, she thought. How can anybody support being enclosed with such dignity? Apart from the maddening laugh that sometimes took him, he never once tried banging his head to the wall or taking his own life, as it occurred to her to do every now and then during her prolonged stay in the house. He must have been getting hungry as well.

Another day passed and she realized she would have to do something to get him out, or he would die.

Let him die, said the voice of reason. He is a man. He will hurt you. Boys have never been kind to you. Boys have spoiled you and ruined your use of magic. Everybody despises you now. You are a burden to your family. Your brothers don't want to see you any more.

The image of Gellert caressing her cheek came into mind and so did his other actions last time he brought her food, resembling so closely the actions of those Muggle boys when she was a child. Except that he went further. She had been ruined already so even if she told what Gellert did, no one would ever believe her. And since no one except Gellert ever came to visit her, there was no one to talk to anyway.

And nothing could be proven! Icy fingers on her cheek, freezing feeling on her body. Apparently if you did it the way Gellert wanted you could not even become with child, or so he told her. It didn't really hurt her but she felt tainted and a bit more dishonoured every time. She wished her mother lived longer and told her more about the ways of men towards women.

Gellert beamed about what he did to her, about what they did together according to him and announced his intention to marry her despite that she was a freak during his last visit. He would ask Albus for her hand before summer. She supposed that she should be grateful that someone wanted to marry a ruined girl while all she really wanted to do was to blast Gellert into the skies.

But her magic was not hers to command. Not when she wanted it anyway.

Ariana looked at the man sprawled on the floor in front of the painting, helpless, begging for water and babbling about wanting to see someone called Lily and James. It was the first time she heard him talk. She decided she liked the sound of his voice better than Gellert's and that he was probably too weak to hurt her.

She thought of Gellert's sinewy fingers clutching her forearms and felt the energy rolling out of her in direction of the barrier separating her from the intruder. The transparent wall still stood. Maybe she should be just a little bit angrier. She focused on what the Muggle boys did to her. Nothing happened.

She recalled the most dangerous memories she had, her father dying in prison for hurting the Muggles who hurt her. She purposefully recalled the explosion that killed her mother with the greatest detail she could muster. None of it worked. Her magic would not move, heavy as a coffin made of lead in which her father's remains were returned to the family from Azkaban.

The man in front of her was so pathetic and worn out. "I don't want him to die," she admitted out loud and the feeling of a new certainty erupted in a wave of magic surrounding her like a spongy, orange-glowing bubble in a way it had never happened before. The wall separating them lost gravity as an unconscious body crumbling down, before it started floating and finally diluted into the thin air, not blasted but somehow transformed into a gaseous substance. Ariana stumbled and nearly fell on the stranger, toppling over an inert piece of wood loose next to his limp hands.

His wand, she thought, sticking it carefully in one of the deep long pockets of her inner robes she never took off, not even for sleeping.

He was in a bad condition. Ariana had never had to care for anybody before. It was always she who needed help and protection of others. How was she going to take care of someone? Still, she couldn't deny feeling confident, refreshed and… powerful.

I can do this, she thought.

After all she tore down the wall without killing either of them and that was a good start.

She went for some water, sat next to him and started carefully pouring it into his dry mouth. One more drop. And then another. The man was drinking and breathing but showed no other reaction, his eyes closed all the time. He was different than her brothers or Gellert, careless and calm as a breeze. When he stopped drinking, she felt compelled to further probe this difference. She remembered her mother comforting her after her father's funeral. Imitating her mother's gestures, she cradled the man's head. Long dark hair spread in her lap mixing itself with the grey layers of her robes like feathers of a wild bird scattered on an empty beach in winter.

It was soothing.

She remained seated for a long time staring at the dirty window, imagining the distance behind it, closing her eyes to remember the colour of the sky.

When she opened her eyes to look down, a pair of shining grey eyes gazed at her in adoration as if she were a fairy from long forgotten tales she adored as a child.