Blackbird, Chapter 2
"Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it."
- Albus Dumbledore
Some months before…
"Is there anything else, Miss. Black?" Professor Dumbledore asked, watching her retreating figure over the rim of his half-moon spectacles. "Anything at all?"
(Somehow she'd become another ornament, another trophy to line the office walls until her use ran out, and then-)
She paused at the spiral staircase, fingers dancing against the bannister as she considered him. The headmaster's office had become somewhat of a constant, the great man that sat behind the desk nothing more than a necessity.
(-then what?)
She weighed him with a coolness that perhaps had once belonged to her great great aunt and namesake, and she decided there and then that she really did hate Albus Dumbledore.
(He liked to collect things. He had bookcases filled with paperbacks and trinkets, shelves brimming with fantastical things, a pensive she'd spent painstaking nights submerged in and a phoenix in a cage to burn up, only to emerge from the ashes as she emerged from the water. She wondered if Fawkes felt as empty as she did once the flames flickered out again and the memories went away. And then...)
Sometimes the visions reoccurred like dreams, the kind of dreams that are followed by sleepless nights and the threat of repetition that dwindles down to some maddening snail pace of a race between the body and the mind.
(Things run their odd course, they perform a function until they whittle down to nothing and get replaced by some newer, better model.)
This particular vision came on like a muggle eight-wheeler truck down the A12, it was hard to explain but that's how the sight worked sometimes. Like it was something tangible and painful but painless all at once. It was this big lorry thundering down the road, wheels churning and chewing up anything in its way. Her pale grey, milky eyes were caught in the headlights of this imaginary lorry, like getting the lit end of a wand shoved in your face at St. Mungos. A sensation like cigarette smoke in your eyes. Then, she felt herself getting swallowed whole, as if those wheels had run over her and the bed of the lorry was overhead, she could hear nothing but the air beating around her as if being pulled by those wheels that beat against the road.
She could smell the sea, hear the waves crash and break over the rock like glass over some poor sod's head, whiskey and foam sloshing against something hard and leaving its stain, the gentle erosion of saltwater ebbing away at stone like the tide. It was a place that had never known the caress of daylight, a place that housed misery and pain and nought else.
Her fingers trailed against the damp stone, a coldness seeping through her bones that she'd never felt before. Then the dark came about.
Outside, a storm was brewing. The dark, wraithlike figures were there and she felt breathless with dolor.
She knew they were Dementors. She was in the corner of a stone cell, the bars were distinctly metal, black iron that sang with the summer breeze. The Dementors roamed the halls, gliding silkily like a dance of sorts, the harried moans of prisoners and the screams sounding out sharp into the night like a vinyl backtrack playing in some dingy house party. Shuttered images, stuttering voices and shuddering skin- She fought to remember it wasn't real, refused to get swept away and lost in yet another vision that would wake her up in a cold sweat.
The man was walking with a ramrod-straight back, his short-cropped hair was styled with great care beneath his officer's cap, peak brimmed with a shadow across his sharp-pointed nose that looked like it had been broken a time or two. Wand encased in hand, the light that ignited at the tip flooded the corridor. He kept his eyes ahead with careful practice, pointedly avoiding the Dementors as they swept past him like ragged curtains on a windy day.
He tilted his head down with each passing cell, eyes darting across prisoners curled in corners and their pale scared faces staring back at him like empty windows.
Slowly, he made his way to the empty cell. Someone was crying somewhere far off, maybe further down the way. The lit wand crossed over the bars, long winding shadows dancing across the barely lit room.
"Prisoner three ninety," he called out, voice calm if not forceful. "Cell check, prisoner three ninety."
There was no reply- nobody there to make a response- and suddenly the officer looked unsure of himself. He placed his wand to the lock, muttering a spell under his breath with newfound desperation.
"Three ninety!" He stepped into the open cell.
Suddenly Lycoris was outside. Swallowed hole, like she'd been dragged beneath a train that raced down the tracks, a blur to the human eye. There was a long winding road, sandy hillocks rolling in the distance, grass merging into the cement and breaking out through the cracks. Above her, the sky sprawled out, and there was Orion's belt. Sirius looking down on her- on him- the brightest in the sky.
She moved forward, an unconscious urgency that was not her own spurring her on further. She sank into the dunes, slipping until she was to her knees and pulling herself to the roadside. The moon was so bright that it drew long shadows that cast pure black, her own a slender figure.
With effort, she lifted a bony hand to her face and realised with a dull shock that they weren't her hands at all. They were lined, inked with tattoos and caked in dirt. The sleeve of the Azkaban uniform was still sodden with wet sand and saltwater.
Then the lorry came, headlights ablaze and horn blaring as the wheels beat like a drum and whipped up sand. She made to move, but this body was not her own. It came, the noise lashing in her ears like a downpour.
She lay flat on the ground as the lorry passed over her, a whimper breaking from her throat that didn't sound human at all. A low whine in her ears that otherwise went unheard as the wheels swallowed her whole.
(The first time the vision had left her with her eyes screwed shut, choking for air. The sound of the lorry ringing out in her ears, it's horn blasting like an echo of something far off.)
She could still see Sirius in the sky of her mind's eye, watching over her. Those stars spanning across the family tapestry that had her half scared as a child. Another part of her, the part that never quite left, couldn't help but feel awed by the saturation of faces on the wall, her own name lost somewhere in the tangle of history.
(And at that moment it felt like she was suffocating. Like the wheels had stolen all the oxygen from her lungs.)
And she knew.
The knowing is what killed her, because the sight always came to fruition in some shrewd capacity that left teeth marks from bites much sharper than her own. It stung, left her licking at her wounds only for another, much harsher truth to occur.
Sirius Black would escape Azkaban.
So she stood there, face carefully drawn and carelessly facing down the man who held her life in his wrinkly old palms. And she hated him so much that it burned.
(One day, inevitably, Lycoris Black would run her course.)
And she lied-
(It was like running along a railway, there was only so much track until one found themselves tipping over the edge.)
"No, sir," she said. "I've told you everything I know."
(And Albus Dumbledore would someday reduce her to another loose end that needed tying up.)
-And she couldn't even begin to explain why.
Some months after…
August, 1993
She could never get the spell right.
Idly, she watched the figure in the painting move with some dim, reeling satisfaction- borderline delirious really- that she accredited to another sleepless night as much as finishing the work. Her spine bore the brunt of those endless hours of stooping with no substantial reward, and she threw herself back in her chair with a long winding groan. The paintbrush clattered from the desk, the sound of it made her jump, and her knee only narrowly missed the sharp edge of the table top of which it had become well acquainted with many a time before.
Scrutinising the figure on the canvas, pale with a dark crop of hair against a green background, she found the silence uncanny- she really couldn't get the spell right.
Then, the girl in the painting smiled the same smile she saw in the mirror.
The palette was too much, she amended with a critical eye. The green background is too rich, the skin overblown with too much white. Or maybe that was the tiredness of her eyes playing tricks on her, the colour contrast as uncanny as the silence. The white she'd dry brushed onto the background, freckling across the canvas, almost looked like snow, and she wasn't sure what the purpose of it was at all beyond some cheap urge that had taken a hold of her mid brush-stroke.
Self-portraiture was a long suffering hobby, one she swore blindly was much harder than any other project she'd toyed with, and that spell- Merlin, but the intricacy was murder- never cooperated fully. She should have just forked out for the potion, should have been prepared, but when the need came over her during those long nights when the silence got to be too much it was a done deal. She'd mail order a crate of it for next time, maybe, but most likely she'd forget and the vicious cycle would start all over again at the dreaded hour of some three am creativity stint.
Well, she mused, I could always claim the silence was symbolic.
(Lying was easy, lying was fun. And Merlin, she was good at it.)
Her painted reflection turned her head, almost as if to hide. She could keep a secret, it's not like she could talk.
(She collected secrets like chocolate frog cards.)
Begrudgingly, she got to her feet, the hardwood floor cool against her bare feet, a gentle breeze nipping at her naked legs from the open window. Her Weird Sisters shirt came to mid-thigh, depicting a startling red image of Myron Wagtail mid wail on-stage.
She was tired, and she'd forgotten to eat again, but sleep always got away from her and her stomach felt cramped at the thought of food.
She thought she might eat anyway, give it a try before collapsing into bed with the vain hope of an easy sleep awaiting her.
On her way to the kitchen she almost tripped on last year's textbooks. The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 5 by Miranda Goshawk clattered to the floor, and a dog eared copy of Wilbert Slinkhard's Defensive Magical Theory disrupted the coffee table where a deck of tarot cards had been precariously stacked. The thick cardstock didn't so much flutter as it did flap around the table wildly before landing all over the place.
The whippet of a girl looked around her flat helplessly, almost thinking better of cleaning or meals and heading straight to her room. Almost. Except, in the silence, she heard his voice goading her to take better care of herself, to at least try- if it were really him there would be no try, there would only be the expectation to succeed and exceed as per the precedent one faced being born a Black.
She wrung her hands, those bony limbs that could spend hours whittling at a canvas but couldn't get the perfunctory notion of spellwork when it came to bringing said canvas to life. She put them to use by frying a sad looking egg in the kitchenette instead.
It was well into the morning then, the sun long broken through the view of the skyline the kitchen window afforded her with and trailing higher by the hour. Her cluttered, cosy kitchenette was showered with a tawny gold that leaked into the open doorway and into the living room of her studio flat, the beginning sounds of traffic and the awaiting London rush hour wafting in the air.
Her plate was laden with grease, her egg sitting atop it's toasted chair of bread and ready to collapse in on itself with one bite. She took it back into the living room, resolutely staring straight ahead and avoiding her painted reflections disarming gaze- she didn't like feeling watched anymore than she liked being told what to do.
When the owl came she had been halfway through her sad meal, the kind that would leave her feeling half empty still but better than nothing at all.
The letter was addressed to one Lycoris Evangeline Black, who resides in some dingy flat in Camden Town. The girl who holds the envelope with shaking hands wonders, briefly, if emancipation had been worth it after all.
It read:
Dear Miss. Black,
We are contacting you today to inform you of Sirius Orion Black's disappearance from the Prison of Azkaban following the twelve years served of his life sentence of imprisonment.
Your presence is required as per the Department of Magical Law Enforcement request for intelligence, of which attendance is mandatory. Failure to attend will result in Ministry representatives calling upon your place of residency and bringing you to the appropriate authorities.
Harbouring an escaped criminal is an offence under Section 22 of the Wizarding Justice Act (1961), and we regret to inform you that if your interview is not found admissible under the appropriate authorities then you will be placed under suspicion in this case involving a severe breach in security. Upon your statement being found inadmissible, this will become a potential matter of the Wizengamot.
Your presence is required at the Ministry of Magic at twelve o'clock, on the twenty-ninth of August.
Yours Sincerely,
Amelia Bones
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement
Ministry of Magic
Lycoris swore. She swore loudly.
If Arcturus had been here he would have had any potential case against her exonerated within the hour. But Arcturus wasn't here, and she didn't like the alternatives.
Steeling herself, she took a quill to parchment to write a quick note. If she was under suspicion she knew of at least one other person who would be too, and it would be in their best interest to brush everything under the carpet. Even loose ends such as herself.
She clicked her tongue and her owl came from his perch.
"Take this to Aunt Cissy, Orion," she murmured, brushing a finger against his smooth feathers.
Because Narcissa Malfoy owed her niece much more than a debt.
Then, with her stationary to hand with the Black family crest and the eagle feather quill that felt too heavy to write with, she wrote another letter. Shorter, if possible. Addressed to Borgin and Burkes, where she worked in the summer, detailing a legal matter she must sort immediately and nothing more.
She didn't have to say more. They'd know all about it tomorrow, when her Uncle's mugshot would sweep across the printer's press and into all of the wizarding world's hands.
Sirius Black. The first man to ever escape Azkaban. Her Uncle; the mass murderer, the Dark Lord's spy.
Lycoris felt light headed and laden all at once.
Mindlessly, she abandoned her desk- all thoughts of bulk ordering portrait solutions gone- and made for the coffee table, where she bent to clean up the mess of cards she'd knocked over.
One in particular caught her eye.
JUSTICE
Her breakfast sat half-eaten on the battered coffee table. Forgotten.