Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Five: A Dog's House
He didn't dare to let Sirius out of the doghouse until everything was finished. It was a necessary danger of the entire process. With Frank and Alice, he could space his progress over the course of several weeks, venturing in two or three times a week to inch further along on the road to recovery. Here, however, even though Sirius was sane enough to function (more or less), he needed to remain trapped inside his own mind, lest he disrupt the process Harry's was undertaking. Harry emerged back into Sirius's quarters at Grimmauld Place, exhausted, mentally and physically, and almost forgot about their guard, until Ron turned to him.
"Were you successful?" he asked, and Harry glared at him.
"I wore myself out. This will take days," Harry was forced to admit. "I may have restored his mind, but that cannot be known for sure, yet. I shall return tomorrow."
He said this with great conviction, and finality, which did not stop Ron from repeating "tomorrow", as if that needed clarification, or Harry might change his mind.
"I risk magical exhaustion, else," he admitted, and Ron fidgeted, and looked down at the ground. He must still remember what had happened at the end of fourth year—how close Harry had come to dying twice in one night. He didn't press the issue.
"Will Sirius—?" he began, as if he had to watch his step, lest Harry attack. Harry rolled his eyes.
"With appropriate precautions taken, he should be fine. Kreacher has been instructed to look after him as best he can. And Remus will ensure that Kreacher does not abuse this trust."
It was a good thing, Harry decided, that they had chosen to do this over Christmas Break, regardless of certain additional complications, in the event of Tonks arriving to visit Remus, and wondering where Sirius was. Still…this shouldn't take more than a few days.
The next day, of course, had to be far stranger than the task had managed thus far. For Sirius's soul had acquired a guardian. It was possible that every soul was supposed to have one, and Mother had usurped the position in Harry's own soul, or that it was a quirk that came of learning occlumency, which Sirius must have at some point. Regardless of the whys, Sirius's soul had a guardian.
And he looked very familiar. Indeed, Harry started the first time they met, which was as he was heading for the servants stairs into the attic. He rounded the bend in the corridor to find the very last person (well, one of the last) that Harry would have expected to see in Sirius's mind. The man didn't speak, but Harry stood there, immobilised, as if he'd been told to Halt! Who goes there?, although the man hadn't said a word yet.
The appearance, Harry had to concede, was eerily accurate. Sirius, he realised upon reflection, must have encountered actual photos from back in the day—perhaps when he'd been attending that muggle university, working on his bachelor's degree. Celebrities, he knew from experience, tended to have a lot of pictures taken of them. And portraits drawn of them, video footage, newspaper articles….
It wasn't that surprising. But, perhaps, Sirius had encountered mention of such a muggle hero even earlier. Perhaps even during his Hogwarts years. Harry'd never given the thought of Muggle Studies even a cursory analysis. But, muggle history must be included. Maybe, that was why.
He took a step forwards, and the head snapped up and over to him.
"You don't want to go up there, son," the man said, and although the word choice was fairly accurate, the accent…well, it was some American accent, he thought, but not the right one, which was more than a bit of a relief. He didn't know his American accents, but there was sort of a twangy drawl to the guardian's voice that wasn't present in the real man's. Still.
"I need to. I'm not some child needing minding. I'm here to help. Can't do that unless I can get to Sirius's soul."
This was surreal. Forget Alice's mushroom forest, or Frank's Venus flytraps. There was nothing more surreal than this. First the real Tony Stark showing up at Number Four, and now this? What was next?
"It's dangerous," said the guardian, with the sort of fatherly concern that Harry could well-attribute to the real thing. "I'm the guardian of this house, and that door up there."
He jerked his chin up in the general direction of the attic window-doorway.
"And you make for a wonderful guardian," Harry said, "now that I have rid this house of the real threats, you appear to proclaim victory."
"The house was too damaged for me to form," the guardian said. "I would have helped you to clear out all those ghouls. Let me accompany you, if you insist on going up."
Harry gave him his most sceptical consideration. "Can you pass into his soul?" he asked.
"I'll get it done," the guardian insisted. Harry had to wonder if a certain admiration for the real thing, evidenced by the presence of this fake as a guardian, was part of the reason that Sirius was in gryffindor house.
"You're coming with, then?" asked Harry, at a loss. Both real and fake had that indomitable persistence about them. He didn't think he'd be able to dissuade a fake with its roots in Sirius's own recalcitrance. "I'll clear the way for you."
A sharp, swift nod, and the guardian backed through the doorway. "Follow me, son, and be careful. There's some residue of those ghouls up here."
It wasn't as bad as Ron, Harry reminded himself. "Aye, aye, captain," he said. It seemed the best response, given the circumstances.
Sirius's soul was even more of a nightmare. The entrance seemed to be the inside of a dormant volcano. Harry didn't know quite what to make of it, and it was boiling hot. By now, he had enough cooling charms in his arsenal to deal with all but the most extreme heat, but he usually used the other kind of magic, lest the Ministry discover that he was using underage magic. He was mildly surprised to find that, even with all of those spells, he was still overheating.
Those spells, and the dementors. He didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed when casting the Patronus charm produced a glowing white stag, instead of a man with messy black hair.
Harry borrowed Leonidas's strategy of bottlenecking the opposition in a narrow pass, and letting Prongs deal with the dementors one by one. Then, he sent Prongs into the darkened cavern beyond, illuming a room far too small to hold as many dementors as had emerged through it. There was a musty mattress on the floor, and a bucket, and little else besides. Everything was dull limestone and iron. A prison cell. Were those useful for a soul to have within them, or not?
Harry, upon much contemplation, decided to cast a solid fortified reparo on the room, after casting the reductor curse at the bars on the far side. At least it wasn't sweltering in this room, despite that the room was a cave, ostensibly a part of a subterranean network of caves joined to a volcano.
This was a subconscious. A soul. It perhaps made sense that it was not as logical as Hermione would like.
He emerged through the holes in the bars into a corridor that noisily dripped water. He was in a castle dungeon, he thought. Not a very well maintained one, either.
He rather thought, given the crates in the corner, that the window in the attic should have brought him here, and not to the volcano. He knew the symbolism of the volcano, when he stepped back from the place itself. And the crates were storage. Memories, soul-knowledge.
A door next the stack of crates led to a dizzying drop into the sea, far below. He closed the door with respectful haste, and stepped back. He didn't think any of that was supposed to be there. The sudden drop, the sea, a Winchester Mystery door.
He sighed. He thought of the window in the attic, and pointed at the door set into the far wall. "Mundum aperio!" he cried.
The door vanished, and he sighed, running his free hand through his hair. What else did Sirius's ridiculously complicated soul have to throw at him?
He'd had a great deal of trouble procuring some of the ingredients for Loki's horrendously difficult deaging potion. He made a mental note to not wax poetic the next time he wrote notes that someone else might need to refer to. Or that he might need to refer to, if he had amnesia, or something. Writing in code with symbols that weren't translated anywhere was more than difficult enough.
He'd had to ask Slughorn for help, which was easier said than done with the man still evading him as best he could. He seemed relieved, as if he'd expected worse, to find that Harry only wanted help brewing a difficult and complicated potion.
It wasn't an illegal potion, because it didn't officially exist. Still, at least all of the ingredients could be found in this world. Some of them were quite common. Others were more straightforward than they initially appeared. "Essence of mind"… "substance of lost time"… well, okay, that one had been harder. He'd had to appeal to Slughorn to appeal to the Ministry, who had been very suspicious. Slughorn, however, had seen the recipe, and was curious. He'd called in Mundungus Fletcher. Harry did not want to know how Fletcher had come by so much of it.
Slughorn was quite enthusiastic about the potion, and insisted that he spent so much time on experimental potions that the Ministry would forget about this one. Harry was left indecisive as to what he ought to think about this newest Potions professor. It was somewhat alarming that his connections were impressive enough that he could get his hand on obscure ingredients like the "breath of the wind", and the hourglass sand, and was willing to donate ingredients from his private stores.
"The theory behind it looks sound," Slughorn said. "I do wish I knew what book you copied that from—"
"It's in the Black library," Harry said, with a grimace. "You really don't want to know."
Slughorn paused, turning back from the open potions cabinet before him to face Harry, who shuddered.
"Still have a lot of contraband, forbidden texts," Harry said. "I had to translate this one."
Slughorn nodded, and turned back to his work. Since he seemed bored by that kind of talk, Harry continued, "Written in a mixture of Latin and Old English. I don't know why the transcribers did that."
"Dunno. That old stuff isn't my style," said Slughorn, bored enough to drop the subject, just as Harry'd hoped. "Here—careful with this jar—fragile, you know. Those wings—they're like thin shards of glass once they've been separated from their owners for a day or so. Most potions don't call for whole wings, either. Are you sure—?"
"You saw the ingredients list for yourself," Harry insisted, and Slughorn frowned, and nodded.
"I'll supervise the making of the potion. A task like this—not the sort of thing you want to undertake on your own. Need a helping hand, Harry?"
Harry knew that Slughorn was looking to get a leg in, a foothold, here, to prove that he was part of a groundbreaking, newsworthy advancement in healing. And Harry knew that he was expected to say no. Instead, he said,
"Well, I'll call Ron in, then, and then there will be three of us brewing. The ambient energy of three people. Sensitive potion should know how many people are around it, right? But, you're not to watch me administer the potion. That's the tradeoff. You waive the opportunity to see that."
Slughorn wanted to have his cake and eat it too, but he agreed to these terms and dragged out a brazen cauldron, setting it on the floor.
The references to Macbeth were inevitable after this point. At least Ron seemed to appreciate them.
Harry would never understand the process of potions, or why they changed colours. How you could add a bunch of ingredients together, and wind up with something transparent like veritaserum was beyond him. This one was a dark grey, with a sort of shimmering sheen to it, an almost greasy look. It was probably just as well that Sirius couldn't see it.
"Yes," Professor Slughorn had cried, upon seeing how it turned out. "That looks right. And the amount of potion you have—you'll want a ratio of one standard size flask per year. That's fifteen flasks."
That sounded quite a bit. He took a moment to wonder whether he might get away with using less of this potion, and leave Sirius's body not-quite-restored. But, that was unfair to him.
"You can borrow some of mine," Slughorn had said, with excessive cheer. "Always have a spare or twenty, being a Potions Master and all. One of my favourite students, your mother was. Would have liked to have had Sirius in my house. Maybe he'll change his mind about me being a boring old brownnoser, hmm?"
He'd said all this, but with so little heat that Harry had to assume that there were no hard feelings, and Harry resolved to return the vials he'd borrowed, first.
Fifteen years worth of potions was more than both he and Ron put together could comfortably carry, which meant that Harry sent Ron through, on his own. Ron was the only person he trusted with the flasks, given his own track record with floo powder. Ron always landed on his feet.
He wouldn't have minded if Ron had started Sirius on his regimen of potions, while he was at it.
The good thing about potions, Harry decided, was that you could watch and observe their effects in real time. And, he could see the years being shaved off of Sirius. But one thing the potions couldn't do was restore Sirius to how he'd been before he'd entered Azkaban at all. He was no longer gaunt and sunken-eyed, with the waxy look of a corpse, as he had been when he'd first broken out, but that was due to having a few square meals behind him, enough to regain some of his muscle tone. The time reversal potion did not do quite what Harry had expected.
But, it worked.
The next step was to see if the whole effort worked, when everything was put together.
To this end, he had to return to the doghouse, and scuff up the circle around it meant to further divorce the doghouse from the rest of reality. Seeing the house reminded him he needed to ask Sirius why Captain America—or a passable facsimile of him—was serving as a guardian of the house. For now, Harry welded the turf divided by his circle back into a coherent whole (which he could do because it wasn't real grass), and then bent down to knock against the side of the doghouse, and to call into the black darkness of the entrance.
A scruffy black hound bounded out a few hours later, looking beleaguered and a bit faint after three days without food. Not that Sirius would be able to identify the problem.
"Well?" Sirius asked a quick transformation later.
Harry folded his arms, and gestured towards the house, and then swung the gesturing arm over to Sirius. "I should be asking you that, Sirius. Do you feel any different? I don't suppose you've forgotten who I am?"
He tried his best to seem as if this were not at all a concern, a superficial sort of suggestion.
"You mean, my best friend from back in my school days?" asked Sirius, with a grin and a gleam of something almost malicious behind his expression. There was something there, an energy to Sirius, that had been lacking. Vitality.
Harry was almost inclined towards wariness. "You don't remember—?" he began. not really believing his own words, but mindful of the fact that Sirius was one of those few who could lie to him.
In reply, Sirius pulled him into a crushing hug that would have made Ron proud, and ruffled Harry's hair.
"Bit odd to do that when you look that way," he observed, but then shrugged, and grinned, again. "I've got so many thoughts and ideas in my mind, now. And… and I can think of things—everything seems clearer—not explaining it very well. Think I still have to get used to it, but I think—I think it worked. Just… give me an insurmountable obstacle, and let's set to kicking probability's ass, shall we?"