"FOR WEEKS I'VE BEEN STUCK IN PRIVET DRIVE, NICKING PAPERS OUT OF BINS TO TRY AND FIND OUT WHAT'S BEEN GOING ON – "

Harry halted midsentence as someone knocked on the door. Ron and Hermione, both looking thankful for the interruption, stepped forward together to answer it.
Sirius was standing in the hallway, his long threadlike hair trimmed to the shoulder, and his black robes looking as though they were five sizes too large for him; the fabric draped over his figure like a tent in imminent danger of collapsing.

There was a moment of silence. Ron and Hermione were standing in between Harry and Sirius, and they awkwardly shuffled their feet as they looked from Harry to Sirius and back at Harry.

"Sirius," said Harry. It came out as a croak. His voice had abruptly given up on him. He hadn't seen Sirius since immediately after the Third Task, and this wasn't how he had imagined their reunion, by any means.

To Harry's relief, there was just a hint of a smile on Sirius' lips.

"Harry," said Sirius, "I don't see you in two months and suddenly you decide to grow six inches." When Harry said nothing, Sirius continued, "Come downstairs when you're done catching up with your friends, how does that sound?"

Sirius made eye contact with Ron and Hermione before he headed back to the narrow stone stairwell. Harry sat down on the bed and stared at the yellow carpet, suddenly too drained to raise his voice.

After dinner that night, as the Weasleys and other members of the Order were filing out of the dining room, Sirius emerged from the kitchen carrying a glass jug full of a frothy, pale-brown liquid.

"Hot chocolate made from Chocolate Frogs," said Sirius, grinning at Harry. "My specialty from my Hogwarts days. Want some?"

Harry shrugged. He had been about to follow Fred and George back to the rooms upstairs, in hopes of catching some more sparsely-informed gossip about the Order of the Phoenix, but now he sat back down as Sirius joined him at the table.

"I must warn you," said Sirius, "My recipe tends to provoke some… well… interesting vocalizations."

In spite of himself, Harry couldn't help smiling back as Sirius poured the chocolate into two mugs. They faced each other and raised their drinks to the ceiling.

"To freedom," said Sirius.

"Er… well… to information, I guess," said Harry.

"Information?" Sirius smirked as their mugs clanged together. "Since when have you been a Ravenclaw?"

Harry shrugged again before sipping his chocolate. As he swallowed, he had the odd sensation of miniscule grasshoppers leaping from the tip of his tongue to the back of his throat. He muffled a burp in his sleeve, while Sirius let out a deafening belch that sounded like Neville's toad when it had been left behind on the Hogwarts Express.

"Whoops, excuse me, Harry," said Sirius. "Must have blended too many Frogs without enough hot water – Harry, are you sure you're feeling all right?"

Harry quickly looked up from his mug.

"Yeah," he said. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"Well, I don't know, certain employees of Azkaban tend to have that effect on people," said Sirius. "What's that on your neck?"

"Wha –" Harry jolted in his seat. "Oh, it's noth –"

But Sirius was already peeling back the collar from Dudley's oversized fleece jacket. Harry mouthed a choice Muggle curse underneath his breath as the old material stretched to reveal the finger-shaped splotches of black and purple on Harry's skin.

"Harry?"

Sirius' voice was so quiet that Harry might have only imagined hearing it.

"I told you, it's nothing," said Harry. He rose from his seat and drank the rest of the chocolate in a single gulp. "Listen, I'm really tired from all that cleaning Mrs. Weasley had me do, and I really should go to bed – "

"Let's talk for a few more minutes," said Sirius. He stood up and rested his hand on Harry's shoulder. "We can use the sitting room next to the kitchen, I fumigated it today with mist of acromantula venom, so the critters should be gone – "

"I really don't need to waste my time talking about feelings, Sirius," said Harry, his voice rising despite himself.

"But I want to talk to you," said Sirius.

"Are you even listening to me? It's FINE!" Harry had a sudden, inexplicable urge to slap Sirius' hand off his shoulder, and stopped himself just in time. "I don't even know where it's from, it was probably from those blasted dementors – they don't exactly keep their fingernails neatly trimmed, in case you didn't know – "

Sirius opened his mouth as if to say something, but seemed to decide against it. Instead, he wrapped his arm around Harry's opposite shoulder and led him silently in the direction of the sitting room. Harry could his feel his own hands shaking, and a chill coursing through his face and spine as if he had just come down with a high fever. He clenched his jaws to stop his teeth from chattering.

"Sit down, Harry," said Sirius, gesturing toward the moth-eaten couches. He then moved to shut the door, but Harry didn't sit. They stood there on the ancient yellow carpet, facing each other, their eyes at the same level for the first time since they had met.

"How long?" Sirius asked Harry.

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Harry.

"Does it hurt?"

"Not real – "

Harry broke off, but it was too late. Sirius nodded slowly, his scarred face expressionless.

"I thought you didn't know what I was talking about," said Sirius, very softly.

"It really is fine, Sirius," said Harry, careful to lower his voice this time. "It's not bad at all. I've had much worse. I wasn't even thinking about it. It's – "

"Does it hurt to laugh?" asked Sirius. "Or… lie down to sleep?"

Harry gave a wry smile. "I haven't done much of either for the past few days, to be honest."

There was a long, pregnant pause. Neither Harry nor Sirius moved. When Sirius finally spoke, it was with a definite quiver in his voice.

"Every time I was beaten in Azkaban," said Sirius, "I spent a few days lying on the floor, too weak to move my legs. Every inch of my body screamed. I crawled to the drain in the corner and stayed there so I wouldn't have to think when I relieved myself. Sometimes I tried to drink the sweat rolling down my arm because the water pail was too far away. I couldn't do anything about it. I just… lay there, and waited for it to stop."

It took Harry several seconds to register what Sirius had said. He had never thought about Sirius' prison time in any detail before. It hadn't even occurred to him. He had only had a vague image in his mind of Sirius sitting in a dark stone cell, alone, silently plotting his escape and revenge on Pettigrew for thirteen years; unkempt, filthy, and haunted by Dementors, perhaps, but otherwise unharmed.

"They – they beat you in Azkaban?" Harry shook his head. "But they can't – they can't do that – not allowed – totally illegal – "

"They're also not allowed to attack a fifteen-year-old boy in a Muggle neighborhood," said Sirius. "I don't think that matters to them."

The silence was different now. It was heavier on Harry's chest.

They stared at each other for a long time. In his mind Harry struggled to describe in words the look that Sirius was giving him. It wasn't the pitiful look that someone would give a wounded cat, nor was it the look a father would give his son during a lecture about hard times from the days of old. They both understood, Harry knew. It all made sense. It made more sense than anything anyone had told him this summer.

"So," said Sirius, "What happened?"

Harry hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then he slipped his jacket off his shoulders, revealing one of Dudley's old, threadbare white T-shirts. He would have expected someone else – Mrs. Weasley, for example – to gasp, or scream, or even burst into tears, and maybe that was why he had never told anyone else, not even Ron. Sirius, however, simply glanced downward at the purpling bruises showing through the body of Harry's shirt before saying in a level voice, "This is worse than I was expecting."

"He – he knew I would be expelled for sure if I used any more magic," said Harry, very quietly. "Maybe even locked up in Azkaban, from the looks of that letter I got from the Ministry. And he was so angry about what the Dementors did to Dudley. So I just stood there and took it. I didn't care anymore, to be honest. He'll overdo it sometimes, but he usually stops short of actually breaking something."

"I see." Sirius gave a long sigh. "So your family does this all the time, then?"

"Not as often as you would think," said Harry, "Especially after I told them my godfather is a fugitive convicted murderer, they mostly leave me alone. But it used to be worse."

Sirius raised his eyebrows. "Worse than this, you mean?"

"Yeah. Mostly about food. And… more kicks, and stuff. Once I ate more than I supposed to, and Uncle Vernon kicked me in the stomach until I threw up..."

Harry trailed off. He shuddered as he remembered the summer before his second year at Hogwarts, when Uncle Vernon had threatened to flay him within an inch of his life and Aunt Petunia had fed him next to nothing for a week.

"But it doesn't really matter," finished Harry. "What we need to do now is concentrate on fighting Voldemort."

Sirius shook his head slowly. "But it does matter, Harry."

"What?"

"You spent the past fourteen years of your life being treated like garbage. Of course, it matters. You can't forget about it, even when your friends and teachers have long since moved on to other things."

"How – how did you take it, Sirius?"

"Take what, Harry?"

"Everything." Harry swallowed the remaining saliva in his mouth. "All of it."

Sirius paused for a long time before he spoke.

"The truth is, Harry, I didn't," he said. "Not well, anyway. I was locked in a cell the size of my hallway closet for something I never did. I was treated worse than a steaming pile of dragon dung, because at least no one intentionally stomps on a pile of dragon dung. I didn't talk to another human for ten years. I kept track of the days, mostly." He sighed. "I can't decide on what the worst part of it all was, because it wasn't even being stomped on. I just felt, so, so empty – "

"The feeling that nobody in the world knew or cared whether you lived or died," finished Harry. "Like you didn't just stop existing, but you never existed at all."

Sirius blinked a few times.

"Yeah," said Sirius quietly. "Like that."

"But then – "

"Who did I talk to after ten years?" Sirius nodded. "I was very lucky."

He took a long, deep breath before continuing.

"There was another prisoner who dug a tunnel into my cell. I never knew his name, and he never knew mine. We were too cautious for that. We called each other 'friend'. There was no ambiguity with that at all, since the only other faces we saw on a regular basis were dementors. I helped him dig more tunnels with just our fingernails, and in return he taught me magic. Wandless magic. Not wordless magic, but wandless magic. It's a strange and beautiful thing, something that children do all the time, so untamable, so wondrous and powerful. You must relinquish the intellectual order and protocol that comes with adult thinking, embrace the unpredictability of it, let go of every ounce of desire to understand it, or to channel it for a specific purpose, and simply unleash it. Ride with it, like a swimmer at high tide, to wherever it takes you. I remember the first time he taught me to drift – he called it drifting, but it was so much more than that – more like a limitless Apparition of the mind and leaving the body behind – I held a galaxy in the palm of my hand, felt its pulsations with the tips of my fingers, went stardriving off an asteroid…

"Very slowly, we moved on to more complicated tasks. We visited every couple of days through that tunnel he built, and during my breaks I sat alone in the cell and practiced drifting. And then one summer, he stayed with me for four days straight. We didn't sleep, we just practiced transforming into our Animagus forms without our wands. And I became Padfoot for the first time in twelve years. Two days later, I escaped."

Harry's mind reeled. He couldn't think of the right thing to say.

"What happened to – the other prisoner?" Harry asked, after a long pause. "Friend?"

Sirius shook his head. "I don't know. I never saw him again. He could have died. Or maybe he's still there, or he escaped, and the Daily Prophet simply didn't publicize it. I have no idea."

"What did he look like?"

Sirius snorted. "Like everyone else in prison. Matted hair and beard, and skin covered more by scars by tattoos than those tatters they call prison robes. Older man, so the hair was on the grayer end of the scale. But his eyes were blue. I still remember his eyes."

"Can you, er, drift anymore?"

"No." Sirius let a long, albeit silent, sigh. "I lost that gift as soon as I found a new wand. I still miss it sometimes."

At this point, they both seemed to realize that they had been standing awkwardly all this time. Knowing the magical world, Harry was surprised that the one of the portraits behind them hadn't made a snide comment about their behavior.

"Well, er," Harry began awkwardly, clearing his throat, "I guess I should be heading off to bed."

"Harry." Sirius reached forward and gripped Harry's shoulder tightly. "I want you to know that you don't have to live like… like that. You deserve so much more. We don't have to live to like that. I dream of the day we can leave behind all this… this rubbish – " Sirius gestured vaguely at the sooty portraits and tapestries on the walls, "and start afresh someplace that we can call our own. Maybe… a tiny cottage in the mountains behind Hogsmeade, so we can look out and drink our tea and see Hogwarts in the distance."

Harry smiled. "I would like that."

They left the room together, Sirius' arm still over Harry's shoulders. Behind them, Crookshanks emerged from underneath the sofa. Her yellow eyes followed them as they walked up the steps and were swallowed by the shadows of the House of Black.