Sirius heard Bellatrix's cast the Killing Curse and felt something hit him in the chest.

But it wasn't the instant death like he'd always assumed it to be.

No, he had time to turn slightly and see the scared expression on Harry's face before he began to fall backwards. Seeing the arch of the Veil pass over him, he realised that he might not actually be dead, that Bella's curse might not have actually hit him. If he'd been too close to the Veil then there was the possibility that the Veil had converted the Killing Curse to a blast of air, but that would still have been enough to knock him backwards into the Veil's surface.

Harry's face faded, the colour leaching out followed by the light, leaving blackness.

Abruptly, that blackness gave way to light. Bright, clear light. A second passed as Sirius shook off the shock of passing through the Veil. A second that cost him, he was falling. And falling from a height. A great height. He was in the mountains. Britain didn't have mountains like these, these were more like alps than mountains, they went as far as he could see, in all directions.

He forced his arms to work and reached into his coat pocket for the shrunken broom that he'd been working on, when Snape's alert reached Grimmauld Place. A few more precious seconds passed before the broom was large enough to ride, but soon he was soaring in large circle, looking for any evidence to pinpoint his location. If he found none, he'd land and cast a tempus et locus, casting a locus when you weren't in contact with the ground was doomed to failure. How could magic tag your location on the earth's surface, if you weren't on the earth's surface?

There! A straight line, that had to have been man-made.

Oh, it was. It was a railway line.

"Oh, thank the Gods." Sirius whispered and spun the broom in that direction, wary of pushing it too hard, it had been sitting in Grimmauld for years, he could remember learning to ride on it, well before going to Hogwarts. Who knew what it had been through, how it had been used or when it had last been tended to?

A train burst from a tunnel and barrelled around the mountain. As Sirius watched, puffs of smoke came from different places along the train's length and as it got nearer him, cracks were heard that matched up with the puffs, fractionally delayed by distance.

"That's not apparition." Sirius frowned. "Bombarda's?"

A blast blew a massive hole in the side of the train, up near the engine, a part of the carriage wall peeled away like bark from a tree-trunk.

"Yep, Bombarda." Sirius huffed. A flash of blue light silhouetted a man's shape within the hole before he was flung out of the carriage, barely grasping at a handhold on the peeled back wall. "Hold on, Bomarda's aren't blue." He frowned at the discrepancy before focusing back on the train and what was happening there. A few seconds later, a blonde man reached the hole and screamed at the man hanging outside the train and began to clamber along the twisted metal, an arm reaching towards the other man.

As the dangling man reached for the blonde, ignoring the empty space between their outstretched hands, the bar he was clinging to, gave way. Man and bar began to fall.

"Shit!" Sirius exclaimed and pushed his broom into a dive, he couldn't let someone die, not when he could do something to help them.

His focus turned from the train to the falling man and he leant forward, pushing the broom to speeds ill-advised for an unstable broom. His feet skimmed barely inches above the surface of the snow-covered mountain, just high enough to be above any rocks that protruded but low enough to lessen the drag of air against his body.

Down and down and down. The man's arms swinging and grasping at nothing were still too far away for Sirius to reach. He snarled and did something that wasn't a good idea. He flicked his wand at the broom and disabled the safety charms and 'pushed' at it with his magic, forcing it to even greater speeds. This was supposed to be a training broom not a quidditch or racing broom, it was supposed to have a top speed of twenty miles an hour, not nearly fast enough to catch someone freefalling.

The man caught sight of Sirius on his broom and his eyes widened even further. His hands moved from reaching for anything, to reaching for Sirius'. Ever closer Sirius crept, uncertain if he would reach the man before the man reached the bottom of the mountain.

Finally, their fingers touched. A gasp and a lunge from Sirius and he had hold of the man's wrist, the man's fingers closing about his. Sirius leant back and began to pull back on the broom, trying to get it to level out and slow down. Their mad dash became a slow descent but the broom finally used up its last charm and failed. They were close enough to the bottom of the ravine that the fall wasn't nearly as dangerous but they still fell thirty-odd feet into the icy river.

When Sirius came up spluttering, gasping for breath and spitting out water, he saw the man a few yards away face down in the river, bobbing along like a waterlogged cork, surrounded by the broken pieces of what had been Sirius' broom. He drew in a quick breath and, thankful that he still had hold of his wand, accio'd the man to him. Or that was what he intended to do but the man obviously outweighed him, as Sirius was the one to be dragged through the water. Once he had an arm around the man, tilting the dark head over his shoulder, he focused on the riverbank and apparated out of the water.

It was dangerous apparating without knowing what the man's injuries were, yes, but his life was at risk and Sirius would rather fall from a couple of feet in the air, than have the man drown. His focus was good and they only fell a few inches. He slid the man from his arms to the snow-covered ground and rolled the prone body onto to its side. A few flicks of his wand and the man's medical condition was floating in the air above him.

"Excellent…" Sirius sighed. "No injuries other than shock and a concussion from hitting the water headfirst. Ouch, shouldn't have apparated with him, that's going hurt for hours." A few more flicks and the man was dry and a waterproof blanket was between him and the snow, more flicks and Sirius was also dry and warm. "Now to try and wake him." He was unsure whether a rennervate would work on a muggle. If the man was a muggle. "Rennervate." He whispered.

The man jerked upright with a scream. "Steve…!" He looked around frantically.

"Easy…" Sirius knelt in front of the man. "Easy. You're alright. You're alright."

"Wha…?" The man looked at Sirius. "What...? You… You're the man that… you caught me… You were flying… you caught me…"

"I did." Something about this man, made Sirius not want to hide what he was, something said that this man needed to know Sirius was a wizard. "Until my broom failed, anyway."

"Broom…?" The man asked, tilting his head in confusion before groaning.

"You've got a concussion, mate." Sirius warned. "I can't fix that, so don't shake your head. Okay?"

"…'Kay…" The man whispered.

"So…?" Sirius asked. "Where are we?"

"You don't know?"

"Mate, the last thing I knew, I was in London." Sirius snorted. "Everything went black and I was falling from the sky above the mountains."

"Steve!" The man's eyes widened. "Oh, shit, Steve thinks I fell."

"You did fall."

"Yeah, but Steve doesn't know you caught me." The man argued. "He'll think I fell and died. I have to get back to base camp."

"Do you know where that is?"

"I have the coordinates, yeah." The man started to nod, only to groan again.

"Okay, no moving your head." Sirius said. "You can't apparate with a concussion, so we're going to have to walk. Which way are we going?"

"Um…"

"What's the coordinates?" Sirius asked. "No. Who's someone you know was going to stay at this base? Their name, I mean."

"Um… Colonel Chester Phillips is our CO and Peggy Carter is his British aide." The man whispered.

"Right, I can work with that." Sirius rolled his hand and let his wand sit flat on his palm. "Ad illud Colonel Chester Phillips." He focused on his magic finding the man with this name. His wand wavered for a second before it spun gently to face back upriver. "Oh, good, we can follow the river for a bit." He sighed in relief.

"What…?" The man huddled in the blanket asked.

"Your Colonel?" Sirius replied. "He's in that direction." He pointed back upstream. "We can follow the river for a while."

"Oh… Okay…" The man just looked at him blankly and began to shiver.

"Ah, right." Sirius grimaced. "Okay, soldier, on your feet." He did his best to channel Moody ordering the Auror trainees around, he needed the man to move.

The man blinked a few times and began what was clearly the arduous exercise of getting upright.

"Good." Sirius flicked his wand and the blanket became a winterweight robe, more flicks and warming charms were laid over it. "Let's go." He looped his arm around the man's waist and dragged the man's arm across his own shoulders. "I'm Sirius, by the way. Sirius Black."

"Serious?" The man whispered, his head hanging low.

"Sirius. Not serious, like 'seriously mean that'. Sirius, the dogstar." Sirius chattered. "My family have a habit of naming their kids after stars. My brother was Regulus, my father was Orion and my grandfather was Arcturus."

"Whoa…" The man muttered. "I thought I had it bad."

"Yeah? What'd you get?"

"James Buchanan Barnes."

"My best mate was a James. Great guy, he loved a good prank. Buchanan… eh, that's not too bad, at least by wizarding standards. Barnes is a muggle name, so there's not much I can say about that." Sirius shrugged, raising and lowering James Buchanan Barnes' arm as it lay across his shoulders. "So, James? Where the hell are we? Or where were you supposed to be?"

"Bucky. Call me Bucky, I can't stand James, he was my father and he wasn't a good one. And we're in Germany... I think."

"Ah, you got one of them, too, did you?" Sirius ignored the comment about where they were, they weren't in Britain, so it didn't matter, just yet.

"Yeah, he'd rather hit me than work."

"Know the feeling, mate. Mine would rather hex men than do anything else." Sirius nodded.

"No hexes, whatever a hex is, the old man preferred to use his fists."

"Hexes are…" Sirius paused. Was he really going to tell this man, Bucky, about magic? He sighed. Yes, he was. "There are four types of spells or different ways to cast magic. Charms, jinxes, hexes and curses. Charms are usually basic things, but you can do some amazing things with charm-work, if you have the skill. Jinxes are a bit darker, not really life threatening and can be shielded against quite easily. Hexes are darker again, they can still be shielded against but you need to cast the right shield or the hex will go straight through your shield. Curses are dark, usually intended to injure or kill, most can be shielded against, but there are three that shields won't stop. One will kill you, one will make you wish you were dead and the other can make you kill everyone around you."

"Whoa…"

"Nasty stuff, curses." Sirius nodded. "I'm trained in everything but those three. I know the theory but I've never used them."

"Huh" Bucky grunted and kept trudging along.

"Any idea how far we are from your base?" Sirius asked.

"We were dropped off about ten miles from base and then climbed over the mountain." Bucky answered. "As the crow flies? Maybe fifteen miles. On the ground? At least on the other side of that mountain." He waved his hand in the direction of the mountain in front of them.

"Oh, joy. We're going to be walking for days." Sirius sighed.

"Being in the mountains at night is not a good idea." Bucky warned him. There's bears and wolves and avalanches."

"The only one of those we have to worry about are the avalanches." Sirius snorted. "I can ward against predators."

"Ward?"

For the next few hours, Sirius talked about magic. How it manifested in children. how they learn to control it. Where they went to learn how to use it. About the various different fields. About Purebloods. About muggleborns. About halfbloods. About squibs. About muggles. About the war that had claimed so many lives. About his time in Azkaban. About Harry and Hermione rescuing him. About living in Grimmauld Place. About the frantic summons from Snape about Harry and his friends going to the Ministry. About falling through the Veil.

Darkness came and Bucky watched in awe, his head having dropped to bearable levels, as Sirius transfigured a handkerchief into a tent, summoned pieces of wood and made a cheery little fire, summoned fish from the river and transfigured rocks into pans and bowls. Plants were summoned and force-grown, to add to a pot.

"Magic is amazing." Sirius grinned and handed over a bowl of fish stew.

"I love magic." Bucky grinned back.