Author's Notes:

I'm sorry to inform you all that...

the chapters, beginning with the last one will be short for a handful of updates.

I'm also sorry to inform you all that there will likely be at least one more cliffhanger in the upcoming updates.

Thirdly, I'm sorry to inform you all that I'm not apologetic for any of this in the slightest. :]

In all honestly, there are perhaps five more chapters to this story and while I'd like to say I'll immediately begin posting Goblet of Fire (taking that week 'vacation' in between) but as of today, I'm actually three (four as of tomorrow) chapters behind in my self-given schedule for that book and it might be a bit longer.

I promise I'm driving myself into the ground trying to catch up, but there's some life stuff going on in the background that isn't making bridging that gap any easier.

This isn't to say that the series will be going on hiatus. While I won't post anything that I haven't finished, it would likely only be an extra week or two (hopefully). I just wanted to share all the bad news at once while you still have this story to enjoy. ;)

Having said that, here's

Harry Potter, the Valerians, and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Chapter Eighteen: Path to the Secret Keeper

Ivory attempts to push back the Madness in Sirius, while Ebony and Remus provide answers to the numerous questions that have built up over the year.


Yoko had about twenty pounds on the underweight canine, and they were of a similar height.

'I can take him,' Yoko muttered.

'At cost,' Shu countered.

In a split second, Yoko's choice was made and, with his little vine-cage in tow, the fox darted to the side and slipped under the bed, where the bulkier canine didn't fit nearly as well as the svelte fox did, and given that Yoko's shoulders came to almost the height of the bed, it wasn't a great fit for him either.

"Yoko!" Blaise cried again, over the screams of Ron as he was jostled, likely painfully, by the jerking motions of the fox attempting to squirm away from the dog and the snapping and snarling of Black's animal skin as he tried to dig his way further under the bed where neither of the canines was going to fit well.

He was given a brief reprieve when Blaise and Neville broke a board each over the dog's flank and he retreated to deal with the new threat.

Hermione cried out a spell, but Yoko didn't hear it.

He was using his time wisely, creating a 'bed' of his power and planting Scabbers' cage in the middle of it.

The rat shrieked and scratched at the thick vines, but his struggles were rapidly becoming weaker the more of the vine's 'flesh' that he ingested trying to gnaw his way through them.

'I'd stop, if I were you,' the fox told him, lowering his head to try and meet the far smaller creature's black eyes. 'Or you'll be asleep before the real show begins.'

The rat screeched at him, but the Assassin was already turning away, squirming the rest of the way out from beneath the bed and slipping around it.

Black's mad, roving eyes were struggling to choose a target among the three teens.

Yoko gave him a better one.

Clamping down on one of his hindlegs, Yoko wrenched the dog's balance from him. The six vines that had once served as his binding before, twisted together to create a rope and lashed themselves around the dog's neck like a noose. Yoko bit down on the other end of the plant-rope and yanked, hauling the dog's head down to the unforgiving hardwood floor.

Black pushed against the fox's grip, trying to tear the 'collar' from Yoko, but the Assassin didn't give him the chance, tightening it and hauling on it twice more, bouncing his head off the floor until the dog was whimpering, still struggling to get back to his paws.

"Merlin," Neville breathed. "How is he still going?"

'Because there's nothing in his head to knock,' Yoko growled, hauling his head to the side, and dragging the larger dog across the floor slightly, keeping him off balance.

'We need more,' Shu commented. 'Force the change and bind him. Neck and wrists.'

'I don't have more,' Yoko told him shortly, as though the fox didn't already know what his reserves were.

Just because they weren't conversing, didn't mean they weren't together.

'Force the change,' Shu repeated, as though the Assassin was being deliberately obtuse.

Yoko blinked, growled, and tightened the noose.

XX

Outside, Harry was having some not easily shaken mixed feelings about approaching the Whomping Willow again.

The last time he'd been this close to its swinging and violent vines, it was trying to crush him and Ron in Mr. Weasley's Ford Angelia.

From the twisted expression on Severus' face, his godfather wasn't having much happier memories and Draco really wanted to ask when he'd tried to get past the Willow.

He would likely never know that the Willow was the least of Severus' problems when the real trauma was standing less than two feet from him.

Ebony abruptly let out a low rumble, almost a purr, and lowered his head.

Crookshanks was weaving between the Shade's legs, rubbing against him.

Using a massive paw, Ebony nudged the ugly cat toward the tree.

Crookshanks, proving that it had no self-preservation, hissed at the black leopard.

Ebony bore a single fang and his rumble became a low growl. "Get a move on," he sneered. "Or I'll turn you into the ugliest pair of mittens anything has laid eyes on."

Snorting indelicately, the hybrid waltzed between the swaying limbs, head and tail held high, and pressed a knot on the base of it.

"You taught a cat how to get past the Willow?" Ivory asked incredulously.

"He felt the need to follow me and my charge around," Ebony replied as they moved through the frozen branches. "Why waste such potential."

"The Willow could have shattered every bone in its body if he so much as twitched in the wrong direction," Tarana pointed out.

"And?" Ebony asked as he slipped through the gap on the side of the tree.

Draco and Harry stared at one another, not sure if Ebony was even sane.

Through the hole in the base, the four wizards lit the way with their wands, and far too soon the group was stepping into what could only be the Hogsmeade Shrieking Shack.

The sound of something being repeatedly beaten on the floor above them didn't let them pause for long.

Someone screamed angrily.

XX

When the others appeared in the doorway, Hermione and Blaise had their wands pointed at Sirius Black, tied to the wrought-iron frame of the bed by sprouts of multiple different plants and a noose of vines keeping his head back at what could only be a painful angle.

Fallen was sure that the roots of Yoko's Death Plant were in there somewhere.

"You missed the entertainment," Yoko panted through a bloody grin.

Sirius lunged against his collar, uncaring of the fact that it was cutting into his flesh and preventing him from properly breathing.

He screamed until there was no breath left in his lungs and tried to break the pulsing vines around his wrists.

Tarana and Ebony stepped back and to the side so Ivory could come into the room unimpeded.

The white leopard ducked his head and tried to catch Sirius' eyes. "Look at me, Sirius!" he ordered.

Even with the noose, however, Sirius couldn't – or wouldn't – meet the glowing gaze.

Grim-faced and determined, Remus put a hand on Harry's shoulder, gently moving the teen so he could step into the room.

Kneeling on the bed, straddling Ron's broken leg, the Defense professor grabbed Sirius on either side of the head and forced it still and down with apparently little effort.

Sirius abruptly went still.

Or still in comparison.

His body quivered finely.

In the eerie silence that followed his screams, Draco thudding to his knees beside his guardian was startling.

"What's wrong with him?" he asked.

"The same thing that's wrong with your mother," Severus told him, putting a hand on his shoulder and wishing he could find even a little sympathy for the man that had caused so much pain in his younger life.

He couldn't.

"A far more advanced form of it," Fallen corrected, glancing at the black leopard as he slunk around the corner of the rapidly shrinking room. "Such is the price of being Bonded, totally and completely, to the Valerian Shade."

"You said he was sick," Harry whispered, pressing a hand to Tarana's flank, trying to ground himself.

When he'd imagined the man he'd thought betrayed his parents, this wasn't what he'd imagined, not even when Remus told him of the Madness.

"There are no words that can get the description of the Madness right," Arcana admitted.

"And though everyone afflicted by it will eventually succumb to this state, those Blood-Bonded to Ebony directly get to this, the final state, much faster." Fallen told them.

"All that's left of them," Tarana said, watching her brother and Ebony's charge, "is this one, single-minded goal. A goal that only the strongest minds can even hold onto."

"What's he doing?" Neville asked, mostly forgotten in the corner.

"What is the one thing that chases away the dark?" Ebony asked drily.

XX

When the last of his sanity had bled away, Sirius had been resolved to not have another thought beyond the one that had driven him as far as he had.

He'd had regrets, of course.

Many of them revolving around Harry and Remus, but he was vaguely aware enough, as he drifted away on the sea of black and slipped, again, past the edge of madness, that those regrets weren't going to hold out against his drive to see Pettigrew dead.

They certainly weren't enough to help him hold onto his sanity.

When that last echo of his vow had slipped through his mind again, that promise to see James' death and betrayal repaid – a life for a life – he'd known that, though he would get that deed done, he'd never see it.

So coming back, guided out of the darkness by that shining light he remembered from his dreams and his youth, he almost thought it was another phase of his own madness.

The light shifted, shuddered, and split apart until it was no longer one massive light, but two smaller ones.

Smaller glowing lights set in a familiar feline face.

"Ivory," he rasped.

"Hello, Sirius," the leopard said wearily. "As difficult to wake as always."

"'was too far gone," Sirius said tiredly, feeling the pull of exhaustion and madness, fighting against Ivory's attempts to anchor him in the present, to drive the darkness away. "Should let me go."

"Never," came a rough growl in his ear, though it sounded far away.

So far away….

"Stay awake, Padfoot," that voice snapped. "Stay awake and stay with Ivory."

"Tir'd," Sirius whispered, though he fought anew to keep his eyes open and on Ivory.

He owed Remus more favors than he'd ever be able to repay in this lifetime.

Nearly made him what he never wanted to be.

What he shouldn't be.

Blinking sleepily, he kept his eyes on Ivory.

XX

Now that things were, more or less, calmed down again, Yoko continued with his 'triage' of Ron and Neville.

Ron groaned with not-so-exaggerated relief as the pain began to subside.

"What the hell? Why aren't we calling the dementors and the Aurors?" he asked, making a face as his tongue went slightly numb and his words came out a little slurred.

"Unfortunate side effect," Yoko told him, answering the unasked question.

Arcana glanced at Ebony, who had positioned himself so he could keep a close eye on everyone in the room and most of whom were in the doorway, without having to launch himself over the bed and its occupants to defend Sirius and Ivory if the need arose.

Not that Arcana planned on giving the Shade another reason to attack them.

"We never had any intention of turning Sirius over to the Ministry," he reminded his charge.

Sirius made a quiet sound, a sort of a cross between interested and confused.

"We wanted to talk to you first," Arcana told him.

"He's in no condition to answer any of your questions," Remus said sharply.

"Any assistance you've received from me is all I plan on giving," Severus said at the same time.

"Uncle Sev," Draco protested.

"Unless you can prove to me, at this very second, that Peter Pettigrew survived Black's temper tantrum in London and murdered the Potters by proxy, I see no more reason to assist you in this endeavor, when doing so doesn't benefit me any longer."

"We don't exactly need your assistance," Ebony sneered. "The Bonded will be enough aid, as they have always been."

Severus clenched a fist.

"That's enough, Ebony," Tarana said sharply. "Severus has proven his worth again and again over the last several years."

"A war-duelist will always trump an untrained child," Fallen sneered.

"And it's never been like you to turn down a sharp mind or a tactician," Yoko added, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.

Though clearly not giving them his fullest attention, Ivory proved to be aware enough to make his unkind opinion known with a wordless sound.

Though he didn't say a word, Tarana rounded on him as though he had. "You will both keep a civil tongue, or I'll make sure neither of you need one for a while."

Sirius tugged weakly on the roots and sprouts keeping him tethered, as Harry and Draco both take a step back, closers to Severus and the others, wordlessly adding their own support.

"Stop," Arcana said sharply, keeping his attention on Ebony. "Explain to me what happened when you returned to Sirius eight years ago."

If Ebony was surprised that they knew exactly when he'd returned to Sirius in Azkaban, he didn't show it.

"Unlike myself, Sirius didn't have a great deal of choice in the lessons of his mother, and he remembered well the little secrets she and Orion had gathered about their fellow Noble and dark houses. He couldn't actively act against Pettigrew and I no longer had a valid thread to follow, so we began to search for one. He handed me names to Death Eaters his family had gathered information regarding their exit strategies on, and I went and questioned them."

"But Azkaban's on an island and surrounded by dementors," Hermione protested. "You couldn't have had easy access to Sirius."

Ebony eyed her like she was something less than a worm and she shrunk back a step.

"There are many things I am capable of that the minds of simpletons can't dream up. Slipping past the human guards of Azkaban was but a thought. The dementors didn't even taste me." He glanced at Harry, Draco, and Blaise by the door. "None of you were ever aware that you were tailed in Little Whinging, and two of you are Bonded to Valerians who should have known."

"Oh, we were aware," Tarana assured him. "Later. At the time we were more concerned with retribution or retaliation from Dark and/or Desmond, given the state Blaise and Yoko had arrived in."

"Continue, Ebony," Arcana said, glancing sharply at Hermione to forestall any additional questions she might have that would derail the conversation.

"You already know," Ebony sneered at him. "I interrogated and murdered for eight years searching for Pettigrew's exit strategy. It was a task that often took me beyond the borders of England, spineless cowards, and none of the Dark Lords bottom feeders were aware if the idiot rat had one."

"And yet something changed to bring you back here," Severus pointed out. "It was a valid and, for you, working strategy. You would have eventually found a Death Eater that could give you a lead on what you wanted."

Ebony turned his head to look at Tarana.

"Tarana died," Fallen said evenly, reading the look, "and the Collective, and anyone tied to it, had felt it. Black and Ebony included."

Remus, who was now massaging the sides of Sirius' head as opposed to holding it steady, ignoring the oil and blood that was snarled within the strands, glanced at the doorway. "Ivory and I felt her die and we felt Harry's grief in the immediate aftermath. We began preparations the following day. If we could feel that in California, there's no way that anyone on European soil had missed it."

"Yes," Ebony agreed. "And in response to that grief, Sirius' own grief and a renewed sense of uselessness, brought me out of Lithuania and a rather promising interrogation. It took a week to return, but by then Sirius had pulled himself back together, through no great help of the dementors. His first thought had been Harry's safety and well-being and I was sent to ensure that the boy still lived. A hard task, given that no one knew where he was." The Shade glanced at Arcana. "Since Hogwarts was the best way to find him, I headed in that direction. You're aware of how that trip turned out already."

Harry glanced at Ron, but the redhead looked as confused as the rest of them did.

"Ebony was in the Forest with you, the night the three of you went to attempt an interrogation of an Acromantula," Fallen told them.

"You three idiots did what?" Severus hissed.

Draco ducked, wisely, away from his godfather and looked at Ebony. "You brought the shadows to life," he said, vaguely remembering more than one of the giant spiders dying in the haze that had been Fallen's rescue of them.

Ebony tilted his head. "I'd been headed for the castle," he told them. "By that point, I had already met Arcana and had been given additional orders to ensure that no harm came to the Bonded currently attending Hogwarts. I assumed at the time that Dark had become aware of what the Crown was doing to his artifact sites and you thought he was headed to the school as well."

"I was worried of the possibility," Arcana acknowledged.

"And your return to Arcana brought the situation of Hogwarts to us, bringing the Crown to the castle to defend against Dark and his basilisk," Tarana said, thinking back to Arcana's sudden determination to return to Scotland, a place they had deliberately avoided on account of not knowing where Dark was. Their original plan had been to head toward Egypt in search of Bill Weasley, the eldest of the Weasleys.

"Tom Riddle and his basilisk," Severus corrected. "Dark had no control over it, though I'm sure if he had been around when it was birthed, that would have been a different situation."

"All this is well and good," Ron said, irritated with the story. "But none of that proves that Scabbers is this Peter Pettigrew."

"When," Sirius cleared his throat, "when I met him in London, he blew the street up an' cut off one o' his fingers. Tried to make his death believable. 's what brought me 'n Ebb to Hogwarts."

Ebony grimaced at the nickname.

"Sirius, James, and Peter completed the Animagus transformation in their Fifth Year, to help me with a problem I was having-"

"The transformations on the full moon," Draco interrupted.

Remus started and all eyes turned to Draco.

For a moment, everyone seemed to be waiting for Remus to deny it, but the moment passed, and he didn't bother.

Ron hissed and tried to pull himself further away from the man.

"I'll be honest," Remus said slowly. "I was a bit more worried that it would be Hermione that would figure me out."

Draco smiled.

It wasn't nice.

"People always forget that she's bright, but not born in this world. My first clue happened before we'd even properly met. On the train to Hogwarts. When the dementors were searching it, Hermione asked if we should wake you up. Tarana said you'd had a rough weekend and not to bother yet. Since Ivory hadn't mentioned any of the weekend exploits and you hadn't woken up yet to say anything it was clear that the Valerians all knew something the rest of us didn't. And every one of them was too surprised to see you on the train to have had contact with you before the start of the school year."

All eyes were on the blond now, except for Ivory and Sirius', though the white leopard's lips were peeled apart in a smirk.

Severus' lip twitched.

Draco folded his arms and flicked two fingers up, paused, and added a third. "My next clue didn't become clear until after the third, Severus' essay on werewolves the first class he substituted for you. In our first class with you, you stepped in front of the boggart for Harry and the thing took on a silver orb. After the essay, I realized that it wasn't an orb, it was the full moon."

Remus shook his head, an amazed smile on his lips, but Draco wasn't done.

"My last clue actually wasn't my own observation. We had too much going on than for me to have noticed it. But I wasn't the only one watching you. Theo pointed out that you were only sick on and around the full moon of every month without fail."

"You are a dangerously bright boy, Mr. Malfoy," Remus complimented with a bemused smile.

Fallen and Severus are clearly as proud of this fact as Draco is.

"That's the real reason you and Ivory went to that town in California, right?" Harry asked.

"It was the primary reason," Remus admitted. "The MAC is significantly more lenient when it comes to my kind and the loss of my pack had made Ivory and I both too unstable to be around without that leniency."

"You were bitten as a child then," Yoko commented suddenly. "Tarana mentioned that the Willow had been used by the Marauders and the gap in the trunk is just barely wide enough for her or Ivory to slip through it."

"The Willow was actually planted for my use," Remus admitted. "It would later be used by all of us, especially as the other three began to investigate and prepare for their Animagus transformations. My wolf was calmer around them nearly from the beginning. It was where we derived the nicknames we would use throughout our school years. The names of the Marauders."

"Prongs, Padfoot, Moony, Wormtail," Harry murmured. "Remus is obviously Moony," he said, glancing at the werewolf still kneeling on the bed. "Sirius is Padfoot; and Wormtail, Peter. My father was Prongs."

Harry took a step into the room and to the side, so he could see Sirius' eyes, brighter and but more focused with every second that he and Ivory were locked in whatever link they were tethered with. "Did you kill my parents?" he asked bluntly.

"Yes," Sirius said without hesitation.

The answer was immediately countered by Ebony's rolled eyes. "Imbecile," he sneered, before turning to Harry and revealing what Tarana and Arcana had waited all year to hear. "Sirius was concerned that the Ritual for the Fidelius Charm wouldn't take because he was Bonded to another soul, which defeated the purpose of hiding the Potters' location in one soul. He had brought those concerns, in private, to James and convinced him to use someone else, but not to tell anyone about it. He figured that everyone would make the same assumption you had, that James would never have trusted anyone else enough to choose anyone other than Sirius. It was to be the ultimate sleight of hand. All eyes would be on Sirius and myself, and the true Secret Keeper would never be targeted."

"Because he would have died before betraying that secret. To betray that would still be to betray James Potter."