Book One – Awakenings

Chapter Three – London

This must be how it feels
To have a home

Team StarKid – 'To Have A Home', A Very Potter Sequel

The first thing that Harry had noticed about Number 12, Grimmauld Place was how dark it was. Not just dark as in lacking in decent lighting, although that was a major issue. It also seemed like the home of a Dark wizard. There were stuffed House Elf heads on one wall, and most of the ornamentation on the furniture and fittings tended towards the serpentine. There were odd artefacts on the shelves and an umbrella stand that looked as though it had been made from a troll's leg. The real indicator, of course, was the reason Sirius had asked him to be quiet when they had first arrived: the portrait of Sirius' mother in the hallway that, when awoken, howled and screamed, calling her son a "blood traitor" and "traitor of my flesh" and Harry a "half-blood brat". There was also the family House Elf, Kreacher, who slunk around the house muttering about Sirius' treachery and how he had broken his mother's heart, and who refused to speak to Harry. Sirius had said that his family were pure-blood supremacists, but Harry hadn't really thought about the implications of that until he was confronted with them.

Sirius had made his problems with his family clear to Harry on their first evening in Grimmauld Place, when he had brought his godson into the living room and shown him an ancient, moth-eaten tapestry surmounted by the family crest and the legend "The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black".

"This is my family tree. I can't take it down, my dear mother put a Permanent Sticking Charm on it," he said, glowering at it. "There are my parents, and there's my brother Regulus. He joined the Death Eaters and then got cold feet. I think he couldn't stomach the killing. He'd been the golden boy of the family for joining up – this was in the days before most people had realised how far Voldemort was willing to go to achieve his ends. I think he tried to back out, but you know Voldemort… it's loyal service for life, or the best you can hope for is a quick death. That's where I was."

He pointed at a charred hole next to Regulus.

"What happened?" asked Harry.

"When I was sixteen, I'd had enough of their pure-blood mania and their insanity. So I left. Went and lived with your father; his parents were lovely about it. So my mother… whoosh!" He mimed pointed a wand at the tapestry. "Bye-bye firstborn son! And then my Uncle Alphard died, and left me a load of money, so she blasted him off too," he indicated another hole.

"Yikes," said Harry, unsure how to respond.

"Look there," added Sirus, "my delightful cousins. Bella and Cissy married rich pure-bloods, and Death Eaters to boot, so they're still on the family tree, even if Bella and her husband and brother-in-law are serving life in Azkaban and Cissy only got off because Lucius is a canny political operator with deep pockets who sold out his colleagues to save his own skin. Not to mention that he knows where half the Ministry's bodies are buried because he's related to most of the staff."

"Is he really?" asked Harry, thinking that this would explain a lot.

"Well… all the old pure-blood families are related. The Weasleys are distant cousins of mine, not that you'll find them on here. Blood-traitors to the last man, thank heavens. But look, the point I was trying to make is that Bella and Cissy are still there, but see the hole between them?"

Harry nodded.

"That was their other sister, my favourite cousin Andromeda. She married a Muggle-born, Ted Tonks. Lovely man. They have a daughter, I believe she's training to be an Auror. So obviously, she was disowned. Utter nonsense. I should try to do something to change that."

He turned away from the tapestry and sighed.

"Part of me hates being back here. This was never really my home, and I have Kreacher and my blasted mother's portrait acting as constant reminders of that. I can't fire Kreacher; he's too old, he wouldn't cope. And besides, he knows all the family secrets," he shrugged, "I'm sorely tempted to stop cleaning the place out, and instead just remove my stuff and invite Arthur's department to raid the place. It's full of illegal stuff that my parents got away with hanging onto when the new laws were introduced because of their family name."

He looked gloomy for a moment, but then changed the subject and began regaling Harry with stories of his Hogwarts escapades.

As the days went by, Harry started to get used to the house. He helped Sirius clean up a bit (he was moving all his possessions up to his bedroom, which looked like it hadn't been cleaned since he ran away when he was a teenager), and Sirius started teaching him handy little jinxes and defensive spells on the grounds that "James would never forgive me if I didn't teach you how to Stun people or jinx them into a mass of boils and little tentacles!" He received a letter from Ron confirming that Mr Weasley had managed to get tickets for the top box at the Quidditch World Cup final and inviting Harry to join them (Hermione will be there too, Ron had added, you need to come so I don't have to explain all the Quidditch jargon to her single-handedly!). Sirius thought it was an excellent idea, and decided that the Ministry owed him enough favours to procure him a top-box ticket too, so he could watch the game with his godson. He vowed to send an owl to someone called Ludo to get it sorted out.

Two days after Ron's note had arrived was the day before Harry's fourteenth birthday. He came down to the kitchen, following the smell of bacon frying, to see Sirius reading a letter.

"Is that about your ticket?" he asked hopefully.

"No," grinned Sirius, "it's from your friend Ron's mother. She's having Hermione over for the end of the summer, before the World Cup final, and wanted to know if you'd like to come along too. So I told her I was sure you would, and we decided it might be a good idea to have your birthday at the Burrow, since this house isn't really fit for hosting any parties. Molly kindly invited me to stop over at the Burrow that night, and the night before the final, so we'll head off tomorrow morning."

Harry couldn't help it. He beamed.

"I've never actually had a birthday party before," he confided, "unless you count my eleventh birthday, when Hagrid broke down the door of the hut we were hiding in, gave me a cake and some sausages, gave Dudley a pig's tail, and told me I was a wizard."

Sirius frowned.

"Never had a birthday party? I knew your aunt and uncle treated you badly, but that's ridiculous!"

He hugged Harry tightly, and Harry smiled at him.

"Oh well," said Sirius, grinning back, "the last few years may have been rubbish, but at least you have some sort of a family now."

A/N: Well, it's been a productive long weekend for my fanfiction, and there's still Bank Holiday Monday to go! This almost killed me though, I kept being distracted by more ideas for silly Luna stories. Oh, well…