Disclaimer: I own nothing - not the characters, nor the world-building. Well, I do own my crackpot imagination, though.

A/N: Thank you, guys, for following, favoriting and commenting on this story.

rorrim rorrim: Thanks for pointing out my spelling mistake. I've just tried to fix it. I'm glad that you like the story.

Nalieva Castellan, Alexa SixT: Thanks for the support. I will try to maintain weekly updates.

Galatea Regina: Haha. I feel you. I did feel that this cliche was a bit over-the-top. Nevertheless, sometimes I would just be plagued with the idea of 'what if...'. And so this story came to be.

Here's the second chapter. Enjoy!

At one point, he sure hoped that he was still in Azkaban and growling at the bars of his cell. A prison which he knew intimately (and in which he stayed by himself) must be ten times better than that which he had no idea about (and being confined alongside his bleeding, raving-in-pain and hating-his-gut long lost daughter).

Inside the Veil of Death was surprisingly spacious, dry and quiet. There was a residing nothingness that felt not quite like hell but far from heaven. It was not dark, it was not white as underworld was wont to be described. There was nothing, no floor (though most of the time when he put down his foot at random direction, his shoes met something concrete), no ceiling, no walls, no dead loved ones whispering temptations, just the billowing of the Veil that they had fallen through. Sirius could still see quite clearly what was going on outside of it. Bella laughing like a maniac, Harry flinging himself into the pandemonium to get to her. People from both sides bleeding and throwing spells at one another. The vision was limited, through, as if looking through a window (a small one), and there was no sound. He had tried, at first, to carry Hermione back through it, but there was an invisible barrier knocking him back without so much as a sparkle. He gave up after the fifth try. Hermione was too weak to bear another experiment of this kind. She had not waken up, just shivering like a drowned cat and wheezing out short breaths that grated on his already fraying nerves. Blood was still slipping out of her school robe and her chest was a horrific mess of bubbling blood and purple gores. What if she dies? Oh Merlin, no.

He put her down, kneeled down beside her, frantically tugging at her robe and blouse, trying to shuffle through his mind for something that was more applicable than Episkey. Healing had never been his forte. He knew some, of course. He was, after all, the most powerful Black in history (according to his previous boss, who had been trying to sell him the position as viciously as any salesman back when they first met, but his vanity allowed it) and the youngest (and shortest serving) Unspeakable of the Ministry - he was arrested on his fourth month of employment. But still, Sirius Black III was no healer.

Her wound was horrible without the shirt and robe for blood and gores to sip gradually through. The cut went neatly from her left collarbone to her breast and curved upward a bit like a V. A mass of jagged, shorter wound from the other side cut deep at the centre of her chest, not deep enough into the bones but crude enough to stay forever. It looked as if instead of precise cutting the way Snivellus's spell did, this one blasted when came into contact with skin and spilled over into one cut and several mess spreading from the centre of the spell. Sirius swore and waved a Tergeo at her, trying to clean up blood to inspect the wound further. The gash might leave a fainter scar, but the jagged cursed wound on her breast would stay gruesome forever. Taking in a deep breath, he muttered a curse directed at Snape before steeling himself to perform a Vulnera Sanentur on his daughter's wound.

It stemmed the blood, thanks Merlin, and cleansed the purple monstrosity enough to close the wounds. The pain seemed to last, though, as Hermione twitched in her sleep and gasped loudly and painfully all the while. He hoped he was not hurting her further.

After it looked slightly better, Sirius slumped back on his ass and let out ragged breaths.

One look at the Veil showed him that in the time he was healing Hermione, the battle was over. No one was outside of the Veil, no one he could see, at least. A pause, then he blinked and moved closer to it, staring. It seemed...strange. Even without people, the rest of the room was clean and orderly, as if no battle had ever happened there. And what a ludicrous thought that was, no? Him healing his daughter wouldn't have taken more than ten minutes. How could people finish the fight so quickly and clean up so efficiently in the short span of ten minutes? What was he missing here?

"I hate you."

Sirius's head whirled around so fast his neck almost snapped. Hermione was still sleeping, eyes swollen shut, but her mumbling voice was distressingly expressive, to the point that even the sound of her grinding teeth could be heard clearly in the empty space. His stomach dropped miserably. She hated him enough that she was professing it even in her sleep, along with her grunts of pain. (At some level, he ought to be pleased with himself. Hate was also an emotion, a powerful one. That she still had it in her to hate him meant that she still cared enough about him, regardless of how warped and negative such regard was.)

Sighing heavily, Sirius moved lingeringly (it was truly difficult to navigate the way here, seeing as he had no way of knowing whether the next place he put his foot down would actually have a surface or not) and sat down beside her prone form. A daughter, he thought, marveling still at the strangeness and almost impossibility of it all. He had nor been a fatherhood kind person, he had never even been a relationship kind of person, and marriage had sounded so synonymous to 'hell' that he had worked himself into an apoplexy every time the word had been mentioned with any reference to his name. And yet here she was. His daughter.

He did not dislike her, no. She was a good kid, somewhat too bluestocking and goody-two-shoes for his taste, but a brilliant, passionate, brave, and loyal kid all the same. No, he did not hate her. He was just...bewildered. She was something he had never expected. Jane Whatsherlastname (He didn't think it prudent to ask Hermione about that, but he tried and tried and really could not remember whether the last name had come into the conversation that one-night-stand sixteen years ago.) was a blur in his memory. Pretty, he remembered, with long chestnut hair and a dimpled smile, and an unseemly amount of interest in teeth and women's right movement. But that was about it. He could not remember anything else. He should, though, he knew. He had to know more about the one who gave birth to his daughter. It was only basic decency. But Hermione had been quite adamant in NOT answering any of his probing questions about her Muggle family, and it just seemed wrong to go around snooping without her permission.

He still was not quite certain of how to act around her, or whether or not his letters and other means of communication had been a good help or had just been a nuisance to their relationship (or the lack of one). But he wanted to to try. Despite everything, he wanted to try to fix things between them, and to get to know his daughter after years of not even knowing he had one. It gave him hope, somewhat, that she had tried to get to him, after seeing Bella's curse. Yet the profuse hate confession just now just made the entire experience confusing.

Tugging a strand of sweat-soaked hair behind her ear with a sigh, he turned back to stare at the Veil.

In the hours (or was it days?) that he sat staring at it, the scenery from the other side had changed exactly six times. The freakishly clean and orderly hall stayed for more than 270 heartbeats, before exploding into blinding light and settling down as an unfurnished inside of something that looked remarkably like a glorified shack. For 400 heartbeats or so, Sirius stared unblinkingly at the shabby old man in well-worn tunics and the beautiful red-haired woman wearing medieval gowns of questionable length and tattled hems going in and out and arguing heatedly about a plethora of problems that he could not catch. There was an attempt at hugging and kissing at one point (initiated by the woman) and Sirius had to refrain from getting sick at the prospect of being forced to witness the geriatric sex between a man with one foot in a grave and a woman seemingly his great granddaughter age. Fortunately, the horrific situation ended quickly, as the old man shove her back with unbelievable strength and pointed his wand threateningly in her face. The woman, in retaliation, snarled right back at him with a fleeting flash of hurt on her fine features and and a blast of green magic that took her away, never to be seen again. The man stood alone, hunched back, defeated and angry. At that moment, the scene beyond the Veil just shifted, smoothly and easily, as if a TV shows just happened to change the scene. And he saw, with no small amount of disgruntled astonishment, that bricks and mortars were rising up all about in the faint structure of what he remembered of the modern day Death Chamber. Wizards in justaucorps and witches in stiffed-bodice mantuas mingled about in great speed, working their wands and shuffling through blueprints. This ended quicker than any other sceneries before it, when a blonde-hair and peacock face of someone who was definitely a Malfoy came disturbingly close to the Veil, thumbing his nose at the billowing texture and wagging his finger criminally as if trying to touch it, and the image immediately shattered into pieces.

When the world on the other side of the Veil was reconstructed once again, Sirius felt a mild migraine coming. How long had he been in here? He lost count of the heartbeats somewhere in between the arguments and the romantic venture inside the shack. And now, as trees and birds coming into view, he was more than a bit put out.

The window somehow shrunk, and now he could only stare at the tiny and jagged hole that resembled a broken piece of mirror to a blurring view of green leaves and sparkling sunshine. What are these illusions? He grunted and scooted closer to Hermione's sleeping form when a breathy and annoyed exhale escaped her lips. She was having a nightmare, he thought, as her body caved in on itself and her eyes tightened with something akin to either pain or anger. After a moment of hesitation, Sirius lifted his hand to her matted hair and stroke it slowly and carefully. Mumbling incomprehensible words, Hermione turned her head a bit but settled down quietly.

Distractingly, he noted that the jagged window had ballooned back into the original size again, and that a dark-haired young man was laughing on the other side of it. A pretty young man in medieval clothes and the woman in green dress hanging on his arms. The same woman he had seen in the shack. There was no shack this time around, though. Instead, it seemed to be the inside of a cave near the sea, and the woman looked younger, livelier than in the other vision. She laughed along with her companion, hands squeezing his shoulder and green eyes sparkled with residue magic. Sirius squinted his eyes a bit, instinctively trying to find any similarities between the young man's feature and the old man from the shack. There were no such things, though, this man was much more comely than the other man, and the kind of magic that exuded from him was milder, more suppressed and could not hold a candle to the vortex of raw power that the old man from before had held. If anything, the nature of the magic this man had, along with his symmetrical features...actually resembled the woman a lot. A sibling, perhaps? Sirius shuddered as a thought occurred to him, especially when the woman stood on her tiptoe and kissed the man in a particularly unsisterly way. Ugh. What was it with the Veil and the soap operas with Arthurian vibes?

Deciding that he was tired enough of all these high dramas, Sirius resolutely slinked back beside Hermione and closed his eyes for a bit. It wasn't as if he could try crossing the damn Veil with his daughter still unconscious and might burst into a blood fountain again at any moment.

He woke to a sweating, frowning, and hissing Hermione. Refraining valiantly from giving out a high-pitched yelp, Sirius scooted almost imperceptibly away from her seemingly enraged face:

"... How are you feeling?"

That was a dumb question, he knew it the moment he let it slip from his mouth.

For a glorious moment between hazing pain and startling consciousness, Hermione almost looked like she regretted saving him. The moment passed quickly, to his relief, and she gasped out a question:

"I... is this inside the Veil?"

"Yes." He decided to stick to technicality, since that was one route that would most likely prolong their harmonious civility. After his long explanation of all that he had observed in here, Hermione blinked thoughtfully and turned her back on him, presumably to stew over the influx of information and wrestle the pain. When she spoke again, her voice was even and her body more relaxed:

"What did you use to heal me?"

"Something I picked up from here and there," He shrugged, unwilling to verbally admit that he had to resort to Snivellus's spell, "But it's only temporary. We need to get you to a healer soon."

She grunted:

"How likely is it that we can find one in here?"

"We'll look for ways to get out." He stated, standing up again and stalking to the billowing entrance of the Veil.

It was darkness on the other side. He could barely see anything and when he tried to push his hand through, the barrier knocked it right back, with small current of electricity shocking him as a warning. Did this mean they were imprisoned for real? Or was there certains requirements they needed to fulfill in order to pass through? He wondered if using the opening spell was a possibility? Opening? Or unlocking? There were no lock, though...

"So you had history with Bellatrix... Merlin, did you have sexual intercourse with her?"

The question were so abrupt and incongruous that Sirius jumped a bit when he heard Hermione's voice. He whirled around to face her, his expression incredulous:

"I beg your pardon?"

She was laying down on her side, staring at him unflinchingly and almost, almost, judgmentally:

"Have you ever fraternized with Bellatrix? It feels almost too personal, her hatred for you." She shrugged with a strange glint in her eyes, "Not the usual disdain she dealt Tonks. She was livid, betrayed and more than simply vindictive." She curled up and made to sit up again, still not taking her eyes of him, "And I know that the Blacks have had tendencies of coupling with cousins. Your parents...my grandparents were closely related as well, no?"

Sirius shifted uncomfortably on his feet, looking away from her. That was a legitimate question, coming from her. But stills, to think that they had been that predictable. He shut off his thoughts before they could take him back to a time bygone, when there were five Black children, when they all burned with a light so majestic it blinded everyone else. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow, though. Just look at where they all are now. The dead, the mad, and the discontent.

He turned back to Hermione, voice neutral and matter-of-factly:

"We had something. Years ago. If I had stayed the golden heir of the House of Black, she would have been my intended."

She was staring unblinkingly at him, though her eyes did soften a tiny bit. He gave a derisive snort and started poking at the Veil again.

"She was not always mad as a March hare. She was...intense, but beautiful and powerful. And at one point, I truly did believe that we would have been happy together." Not good, but happy.

"But star-crossed lovers rarely survive the day." She inputted softly.

"I wouldn't go that far, kiddo." He was smiling now, though he still made certain not to look back at her, "But yes, sex and passion was one thing, but promises were another. She was the only one of us five who loved the ideals and concept of the Black family the most. When each of us more or less betrayed her in our own way, she went crazy."

Casting a soundless opening spell, he jerked back when a small explosion bounced back at him.

"In the end, it was inevitable, I think. I have always loved James more than I loved her, just as I have loved my freedom more than I loved James, the same way I love myself most of all."

He looked her in the eyes now, giving her a smile full of teeth:

"Your father is a selfish person, Hermione. Is that what you want to hear, asking that question?"

For a moment, his daughter looked flustered, then she steeled herself and gazed steadily at him:

"You always reach the worst possible conclusion. Does this mean you are under the impression that I hate you?"

Sirius did not answer her, but he refused to turn away.

She looked straight at him and enunciated carefully:

"Because I don't. Really." Clutching her chest and wheezing out a cough, she held up a hand to stop him from rushing to her side, "I don't hate you, Sirius. I'm just uncomfortable with you in my life, is all. Your existence turns my life upside down. You make me feel sad whenever I think of my Muggle father, knowing he isn't really my father. You make me feel scared of my mother, who would have been scary indeed if she had known who my father really is all the while and lied to everyone about it."

She was kneading her temper now, looking more frustrated than pained.

"I thought of myself as a Muggleborn, I was proud of it. I liked that blood-purists have to grit their teeth in frustration that me, a Mudblood, was better than all of them combined, be it in raw magical talent or in speedy theoretical comprehension. I even dreamt of entering into Politics in the future, so I can make an example of myself - a Witch, a Muggleborn who stand at a position where she can make changes - progressive changes - to the Wizarding World. It will drive home that inbreeding is not the answer and that the newer the blood, the greater a magician can be."

She let out a hollow laugh:

"But now, with half of my blood being your blood, and the blood of generations of inbreeding, everything I stood for, every I hurled at Malfoy over the years suddenly becomes a bunch of hypocritical whines! It drives me mad, and makes me more uncomfortable than you would ever believe."

She was breathing hard by the end of her speech, eyes blazing and teeth grinding murderously. He wondered briefly if he got this fire-breathing temper from him. Clearing his throat and pretending to act composed in his exuberance, Sirius ventured cautiously:

"Well... if no one knows about it...?"

"It's not about that." She tugged a straying hair behind her ear in one impatient movement, "It's about the righteousness of things. It's about how I view myself. Do you under... wait, why are you looking prettier?"

This made him frown:

"What are you talking about?" How could she jump from haranguing passionately about blood status to complimenting his appearance in such a short time? This she definitely did not inherit from him. Maybe.

"I'm talking about that." She was openly goggled at him now, gesturing grandly at something on his face, "Don't you feel it? Your lines are disappearing. Oh. Not prettier, more like, younger?" She finished with a question, then immediately started looking alarmed, "Wait a minute. Is that happening to me, too? Am I becoming a baby?"

She was not, really. It made him smile at how horrified she was acting:

"You're fine. Nothing's happening on your face. And no, I don't particularly feel anything. Is my face changing that much? Perhaps it is the magic inside the Veil?"

She turned glum at that:

"You look exceptionally young, is all. Late twenty or early thirty, I guess."

"Well, I am in my thirty's."

He was, too. He only ever looked old and haggard because of the years inside Azkaban and the time being on the run after that. He did not feel anything out of sort, but Hermione weren't one to be deluded by mere illusions, so maybe the Veil was doing something to his face. Why, though?

After a while, his daughter looked even glummer:

"It's stopped now. How come I'm bursting several arteries over here when you go and have a makeover by ancient magic?"

He would have smirked and gave her a teasing comment, if not for the fact that Hermione immediately spat a cough full of blood the moment she finished the last word. This also followed by a series of wheezing rasps and gasping pants. Sirius abandoned his quest with the damn Veil and rushed to her side:

"Breathe now, Hermione. I think you should sleep this off and let me deal with the escaping route…"

She paused in the middle of her coughs and held a hand to keep him silent:

"Time," she gasped, "I think…answer…time."

He halted at her words and everything started clicking. Every vision they had seen were points of time that might or might not had happened just outside this Veil.

"Do you mean we do it like Apparition?" He asked, intrigue now, "But instead of only three D's, as we can see though the Veil, we also have to guess correctly the point of time on that side and just, what, Apparate?"

She nodded, still somewhat winded, and confirmed slowly:

"You have tried several opening, unlocking and transporting spells, to no avail. If even barrier destroying spells did not yield results, direct Apparition might be the solution. We should try Apparition, with Destination, Determination, Deliberation, and Time, to the exact place and time that is happening outside."

He was scowling now:

"That's vague. We might be able to guess the period, even years if we are in luck, but what if the requirements include details up to hours? Or minutes? Or seconds? Hermione, we would be Splinched. No, we will definitely be Splinched." A memory came to him and he became aven more agitated and adamant, "Absolutely not! You might not mind spending your days without an internal organ or two, but I happen to frown upon having a daughter with a possible variation of asplenia syndrome! Let's think of something else."

Hermione looked ready to object, but suddenly went silent and stared astonishingly at something outside of the Veil. Sirius turned to see what had captured her attention. It was the Death Chamber again, and two office workers were sitting in front of a desk discussing something. In fact, the younger man, dirty blond hair and as skinny as a rod, was waving a book at the other man, looking all smug and pleased that even Sirius wanted to bash his head in just to wipe the smirk off. Hermione's interjected breathlessly:

"Help me get closer to the Veil, please. I think I know when this is."

He complied, still keeping an eye on the scene outside, just in time to glimpse the annoyed look the older, balder man were sporting. He recognized neither the time nor the people sitting there. But then, on hindsight, it wasn't as if he had known every Unspeakable and office worker at the Department of Mysteries in his time, either. Back then, he took great pride in being a lone wolf that was so handsome people had no choice but to forgive him in all his reprobate glory.

Hermione, for her part, wasn't focusing on the two nondescript men, either. Instead, she was squinting her eyes and boring holes into the cover of the book being waved around with an obviously unnecessary amount of interest. Merlin, leave it to his daughter to be salivating over a book when they were being confined in a magical prison for the dead. "It's said 'First Edition' on the cover, no?" She asked with an excited voice, "Check it for me, Sirius! It's 'First Edition', right?"

Startled, he looked carefully at the book again. Leather bound, moving inlayed gold title of 'Fantastic Beast & Where to Find Them', and true enough, a tiny 'First Edition' can be seen at the lowest part of the cover.

"It is!" Hermione jerked in his arm, answering her own question by herself. She fairly bounced as she looked up at him, "Maybe it's the year it was published! The book looks to new to have been bought before. Then maybe it's..."

Before she could even utter the year in mind, a sudden familiar pressure built up in his stomach and Sirius instinctively hoisted Hermione up on his arms and braced himself for a forced-transportation magical mechanism. It was just in time too, for they were immediately being folded into a tiny ball and sucked into a too-tight rubber tube. Worse yet, this tube was much longer than what he had been used to, not mention cold and slimy as if massage oil had been rubbed all over the place. It was several time worse than actual Apparition, and Hermione's distant echo of "niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii" seemed to agree with his assessment.

Oh well, it seemed that her idea wasn't correct, after all. The Veil had no qualm about spitting them out at any point of place and time it wanted without taking into account their preferences.