14

Proper Introductions

Everyone continued to stare at Dumbledore blankly. He had been having this effect a lot lately. He set the cards aside. "When, Sirius initially switched places…"

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"When our Sirius was replaced with another Sirius, we thought there were only two realities involved." The sound of heavy footsteps approaching the chamber prompted him to retrieve his disgustingly ornate quill and offer it to the group. The group here consisted only of himself, the Potters, Neville, and the newly exchanged Sirius. Everyone but Sirius and Lily reached out to touch the portkey.

"I'll need you to…" he glanced at Sirius. "Oh, yes, my apologies. If you could turn around, Sirius."

"Albus, I doubt he could do much harm even if we did free his hands." Lily interjected, as Albus moved the portkey to accommodate Sirius.

Albus glanced from Lily to Sirius."Am I correct to assume" he said, "That some iteration of myself oversaw the exchange at the veil?" Sirius nodded. The quill began to glow blue. Several unspeakables burst through the chamber door. "Well I don't imagine…" the Department of Mysteries spun out of existence around them, eventually settling back into the shape Dumbledore's office, and Dumbledore went on as if it hadn't. "…that I would allow that without good reason."

"Alright, Sirius." Said James, "What's the story? What's Dumbledore's reason?"

Everyone rapidly recovered from the portkey and fell silent.

"I'm a death eater." Said Sirius, in a tone so flat and acceptingly matter-of-fact that for a half-second, everyone forgot to be horrified.

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"We thought," said Albus, sitting slowly on the edge of the stone dias and inviting James and what remained of the Black family to join him. "that their were only two realities involved. There has been an unfortunate mix-up. You see…" James interrupted him.

"We can't stay here, Albus."

"It's about as safe as anywhere," he looked somewhat peeved to have been interrupted. "But I suppose you're right. James, Regulus, standard traveling procedures, meeting place number three." They both gave him a disapproving glance, but Albus waved them off, "Call me nostalgic, but Sirius will probably know where it is no matter who he is. Luke," Albus handed the boy a small bag of hard candies. "End on red. Cherry, not Strawberry. And don't eat-"

"I know, Albus." Luke grinned. "Don't eat the lemon ones." he popped a blue raspberry into his mouth. It probably glowed blue, but it was hard to tell, and then he was gone. Small pops signaled that Regulus and James had immediately followed.

"Sirius—you can apparate, right?"

"Of course."

"Good. Apparate a few places, anywhere you like, and end at your old house. Grimmauld place. Check the mail." And Albus dissapparated.

When Sirius got to Grimmauld place, knowing better than to think about Dumbledore's motives, he found a note in the mailbox directing him to Albus' office. He stared at it, puzzled. Noone could apparate to Hogwarts. He shrugged and tried anyway, and found that it just like apparating anywhere else.

The room was filled with the shadows and sillouhettes of everyone he would have expected to be there, but it was not precisely Hogwarts anymore. Sirius felt his way over to the window, the only source of light in the room. He looked out onto the grounds. "James," he said, tentatively. "What is this?"

James paused his rifling through cabinets and looked up, his face lit by wandlight. "Don't tell me your reality doesn't have a Hogwarts."

Sirius couldn't take his eyes off it, but the shock of it prevented him from taking it seriously. It was like seeing your best friend crushed to death by a giant vermillion housecat. Terrible, tragic, and so terribly confusing that it's almost funny. "Where I'm from Hogwarts has… I don't know, glass in its windows and trees in its forest and..." Sirius leaned further out the window. "…and water in its lake."

The Black Lake was little more than a Black Mud Puddle; a damp, yawning chasm garnished with the moldering skeleton of a giant squid. Beyond that, the charred stumps of the Forbidden Forest stretched to the horizon.

"Really a shame about the forest." Sighed Albus, conjuring himself a chintz armchair and taking a seat.

"Oh, he's just like the last guy." Regulus groused, then affected a mocking, high-pitched voice. "In my reality, Lord Voldemort was a terrifying butterfly and every kitten in the whole land tried to bat at him and time after time they failed…" Regulus glanced at Sirius, smirking, to see if he had gotten a rise. To his disappointment, Sirius was still fixated on the ruined castle. Regulus gave a short, exhasperated sigh, dropped to a crouch next to James, and lowered his voice to a near-whisper. "Do we trust him?"

James was slightly surprised. "Why wouldn't we?"

"He's off, James, and you know it."

"Give him some time. You've probably died as well."

Regulus glared. "It's not just that."

James ignored the comment and shouldered him out of the way of his cabinet-digging. "Ten more minutes and he'll wonder why he missed you at all."

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Dumbledore sank into his desk chair and, after replacing his disgustingly ornate quill, began to build the foundations of a card tower. His coherent explanations had been repeatedly interrupted and then completely ignored in favor of a detailed game of spot-the-differences between the New Other Sirius' native reality and the reality at hand.

"So my parents aren't dead where you're from…"

"…but Voldemort is?"

"Yeah…Hold on, why did you ask me if I was ever sent to Azkaban? Why the hell would I have been in Azkaban?"

"Oh, you lucky bastard..."

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"People, come on." Tonks had leapt up on the dais to get a closer look at the recently stunned man. "We're looking for a death eater." She pulled Sirius, still unconscious, into a sitting position by the front of his robes so everyone could see. "This guy wouldn't know a dementor if it bit him in the arse." Hyperbole aside, she was right. He looked at least a decade younger than either of the Siriuses they had seen, and in comparatively robust health.

"Not every death eater went to Azkaban…" Remus suggested, with very little conviction. Tonks rolled her eyes and aimed her wand.

"Ennervate."

"Gnughhello." Sirius rolled onto the balls of his feet and into a standing position, then turned to Tonks. "I'm in the wrong reality. Yeaheh," he smiled, "You already knew that, never mind." He rubbed the back of his head and gave both the Order at large and the stone floor behind him a disapproving glance "Merlin's pants, quick on the stunners around here, aren't you? I wonder if that's why you're not dead…" He made the last comment largely to himself.

"Sirius, are you a death eater?" Dumbledore asked, almost lazily.

"No, why would—oh…" his face lit up light he had just figured out the punchline to a very clever joke. "Oh, but I'll bet I am." He laughed in a single, short bark. "Here. The me that you were looking for."

"That's right, brilliant," said Tonks, "Now I know we're going to have some unfounded accusations for New New Sirius, but let's hold those and portkey back to Hogwarts before the unspeakables find us. I feel like we're behind some kind of schedule."

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There was a half-second lag where everyones brains realigned themselves so that Sirius Black could be evil. Except for Lily and Dumbledore, who had suspected it all along, but couldn't think of a polite way to point this out. During the half second, Lily thought something along the lines of "Well, duh." After the half-second, James and Harry donned near-identical expressions of loathing and drew their wands. Neville shuffled forward as quickly and unnoticeably as he could to pull Kate Potter out of harm's way.

When his daughter was safely behind Neville, James fired a nonverbal spell at Sirius and began to close the gap between them. There was a faint metal click as the spell hit, and another as the manacles fell to the floor behind Sirius. "I'm morally opposed to punching a man who can't punch me back." James explained evenly, then punched Sirius. "I'm also morally opposed to you."

James' second sentence went unheard and unanswered because Sirius had already fallen to the floor, unconscious. James' third sentence—"Aw, Hellfire, he can't take a punch." Also went unheard, this time because it was drowned out by everyone else's cries of either "Dad!" or "James!" or, in Kate's case, "Sirius!"