2

It was already beginning to grow light in the east when Sirius brought Buckbeak down in a small clearing in the trees that lined the shores close to Derwentwater. He took out the wand he had liberated from Professor Flitwick's office and whispered 'Lumos'. The cone of light that erupted from the tip pushed back the last vestiges of shadows that clung to the narrow spaces between the trees. Sirius and Buckbeak followed the worn track leading from the clearing down towards a small tributary stream that would, if memory served him, lead them to Ariadne's house.

He had only been here a handful of times before. Many years ago. He had been a little worried about finding the place again but now that he was here, it was as though he had never been away. Everything from the heathers lining the hillside to the shimmering golden glint of early morning sunlight on the gently shifting lake below and the dark silhouette of St Herbert's Island looked exactly the same in reality as they had in his memories, and he derived a deep sense of comfort from the thought that there were still some things that hadn't changed during the past twelve years.

After a few minutes walk the trees began to thin as the ground sloped gently downwards and the lazy stream started to babble and splash as it made its way over stones and boulders in its path, gathering energy with its increasing gradient. On a small plateau, just before the ground began to slope downwards again, the stream had formed a small pool. On its banks stood an old watermill and beside it, Ariadne's house.

It was a small, homely-looking place, with smoke pouring welcomingly from the slightly askew stone chimney mounted above a thatched roof. It seemed to be lit from within, the light strong enough to hold back the shadows that tried to encroach from the edge of the trees. Although little sun penetrated the canopy here, an explosion of roses grew around an arched trellis over the door and more flowers had interwoven themselves around the picket fence that surrounded the cottage. The garden was rich and heady with the scents from the multitude of flowers and herbs that flourished there, the carpet of colour interspersed with apple, hawthorn, fire seed and other trees that Sirius didn't recognise. He smiled to himself; she always did have a gift for herbology.

It was a perfect home for her, protected both from Muggles and the magical community with a host of repelling charms. No one would ever have found her here if she didn't want them to. And undoubtedly she didn't.

Not after...

'Wait here, Beaky,' he whispered to the hippogriff, stroking his razor-sharp beak. 'If she doesn't break my nose, I'll come get you.'

Buckbeak keened gently in the back of his throat and bowed his head before turning to nibble at the leaves on some of the lower-hanging branches of an oak tree.

Sirius headed towards the heavy wooden door with a tightening in his stomach he hadn't felt in a long time. Mostly nerves. He supposed that was to be expected. But also something else that was harder to pin down. If pushed, he would have said it was fear - of rejection; of having no-where else to turn; of being unforgiven.

Of daring to hope again.

But he was here now. He had to know. One way or the other.

For better or for worse...

He knocked on the door.

'Who is it?' said a female voice from inside - a slightly apprehensive one. She probably wasn't used to visitors.

A vacuum was eating at his insides. His tongue had been replaced by a lump of dry sponge. He cleared his throat. 'Ari? It's...it's me.'

The door flew open.

His heart ached to see the toll the past twelve years had taken on her. Her long, jet-black hair still hung in a loose tangle over her shoulders, although it seemed a little more dull than it used to be. Her skin was somewhat paler than he remembered too, although that was probably down to the near isolation that she had been reduced to, but nowhere was the passage and pain of the years written more clearly than in her eyes. Huge, sea-green pools that used to sparkle with life, they now seemed darker, their light extinguished, their beauty muted to an unpolished jade.

But she was still so beautiful, more so than she had ever been in twelve years worth of dreams and fantasies.

Twelve years…

So unbearably long...

Four thousand, three hundred and eighty days and nights; one hundred and five thousand hours of darkness, loneliness, despair…more than six million minutes; each one ticking by so torturously slowly. Each one an endless lifetime.

And he knew every second told on his face too, but seeing the mirrored suffering in someone he cared about was worse than a hundred years in that dank, dark cell.

'Oh my god…Sirius,' she gasped, looking at him as though she were seeing a ghost. 'What…what the hell are you doing here? They're looking for you…they're…'

'I know,' he replied, lowering his gaze to the stone step, unable to bear the pain of seeing her again and thinking of everything that might have been. This was harder than he had ever imagined. 'I don't have any right to be standing here, I know that. But I need your help, Ari. Please. I don't have anyone else to turn to.'

She glanced beyond him into the trees, scanning the shadows behind the limits of her fence. Her eyes looked like those of a startled rabbit sensing a predator. 'Sirius, you shouldn't have come here. They'll know…they'll suspect at the very least. I can't get served in Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley as it is. They're even wary of me in Knockturn Alley. I don't want to make things any worse than they already are and I don't want any more trouble with the Ministry. I'm sorry, but you'll have to leave.'

He closed his eyes, frantic fear clutching at his heart. When he opened them again, he forced himself to look at her, hoping that she would find it harder to turn him away if she had to meet his eyes. 'Ariadne, please…I'm begging you…don't turn me away. I have evidence to prove my innocence. Pettigrew's alive and I just need some time to track him down. I can't spend the rest of my life running. Harry needs me, and I can't be there for him like this. If the Dementors catch me, they'll…' He couldn't bring himself to say it. The prospect was too horrific to verbalise. 'I'm so tired...watching all the time, constantly being aware, not being able to sleep... I'm not asking for anything more. I just need somewhere to hide. Somewhere safe. Ari, please help me.'

She sighed, watching him as he swiped angrily at his watery eyes. Whether some distant memory of the history between them had floated to the surface or whether she just felt pity for him, she stood aside to let him pass.

'All right, Sirius,' she relented, 'come in. Quickly.'

He did as he was told, hoping that Buckbeak would be patient for just a little while longer.

'You look awful,' she said as he stood in the hallway, hovering awkwardly, his eyes flicking over his surroundings as he fidgeted with the running hem of his prison jacket. She folded her arms, watching him, a soft smile playing at the corners of her mouth. 'You smell pretty bad too, you know.'

He looked down at himself, sniffed at his arm. 'I'm sorry...I haven't been able to take care of things like that. Living the way I have the last year... It's hard trying to stay ahead of the Dementors.'

'Yes, I read in The Prophet that the maximum penalty had been authorised.' She shook her head, denying a truth she already knew. 'I am so sorry, Sirius. Really I am. But you haven't done much to help yourself, have you? Breaking out like that, terrifying the whole of Hogwarts, slashing at paintings and scaring thirteen-year olds half to death by hovering over them with bowie knives in the middle of the night.'

'Bloody Prophet,' he muttered, 'never gets anything right. It was a scimitar.'

She couldn't help but smile. 'Sirius, I - '

'I would never have hurt anyone, you know that. It was Pettigrew I was after. Not Ron Weasley.'

'I'm sure the boy didn't know that at the time.'

'I did apologise to him, you know.'

'Look, why don't you go upstairs and take a bath, get yourself cleaned up. When I left home, some of Severus' old clothes got bagged up with mine. I don't know if they'll fit, but you're welcome to take a look. They're in a trunk in the spare bedroom. I'll get you something to eat. You look like you haven't had a decent meal in a long time.'

'I haven't. Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I ate at all. Thank you, Ariadne.'

'Don't thank me yet, I haven't decided whether or not to let you stay. And cut your hair and that god-awful beard while you're up there. You look like a grizzled old mountain man.'

He laughed, scratching at the matted, coarse wire-hair that covered his chin. 'Yeah, I suppose I do.'

Sirius turned and headed towards the rickety old wooden staircase that angled up to the first floor like something out of an Enid Blyton story. He had climbed only three steps before he stopped. 'Ari, I have a friend outside. Buckbeak. He's pretty hungry too. Do you have something you could give him?'

'Buckbeak?'

He grinned. 'I thought The Prophet was keeping you up to date on all the latest news regarding - ' he put on a deep, news-caster's sort of voice, ' - that murdering, black-hearted blaggard, Sirius Black, and the most vicious and dangerous animal ever to stalk our lands, Buckbeak the hippogriff…two of Lord Voldemort's closest companions…the most sought after dark wizard since Voldemort himself….'

Ariadne hissed. 'Sirius, you mustn't speak the Dark Lord's - '

Merlin's beard, aren't you a bit long in the tooth for that? Anyway, he's on the run from the Ministry too. He helped me escape and…well,' he sighed, 'it's a long story. I'll explain after I've cleaned myself up.'

'Well, I'll see what I can find for him. Though it's been a while since I've tried to befriend a hippogriff.'

'I have the utmost faith in you,' he replied as he started to climb the stairs.

Ariadne's cottage was much larger inside than it appeared to be from the outside. Thick, heavy wooden beams held up the whitewashed ceiling and formed a backbone to the walls along the hallway. There were four staggered doorways from the hall leading to the bedrooms and bathroom, and even though it had been years since Sirius had last walked here, he didn't have too much trouble finding his way around.

The wooden trunk Ariadne had mentioned stood at the foot of a large bed in what would have been, by anyone else's standards, a master rather than a spare room. On the other hand, perhaps he wasn't the best person to judge room size, being stuck in a seven by six foot cell for a third of his life. He popped the catch on the trunk and heaved the lid open to look inside. Most of Snape's robes were probably going to be far too big for him since he'd lost so much weight, but they had to be better than his prison rags that were beginning to smell as though something had died in them.

Actually, he thought, as he pulled the clothes out and started going through them, they weren't too bad. Old Snivellus must have finally developed some fashion sense after leaving Hogwarts. There were some highly acceptable black shirts, doublet-style waistcoats, cloaks, trousers, more formal robes and even some Muggle-ish jeans, t-shirts, regular shirts and a leather jacket. Sirius laughed to himself. He never knew Snape had it in him. But at least the clothes were clean, dry, and they still smelled as fresh as the day they were laundered, which made them a thousand times better than what he currently wore.

Sirius chose a pair of black jeans, loose-fitting white shirt and some black boots before heading back down the corridor to the bathroom. While he waited for the bath to fill, he turned to the mirror on the cabinet over the sink and wiped away the condensation to take a good look at himself.

No wonder he had cut such a menacing figure. He even frightened himself. The gaunt, lifeless face with the dull, dark eyes he saw staring back at him was someone he hardly recognised. No wonder Harry, Ron and Hermione had thought him to be a complete maniac when they had seen him. It was hardly the best first impression he had ever made in his life.

He had never been particularly accomplished in the area of personal grooming charms, preferring to trust a more mundane way of cutting his hair and beard, lest he end up looking even worse than he did at the moment. So, in lieu of an impossible visit to Snippets and Curls in Diagon Alley, he opened the bathroom cabinet and found a brush and a pair of scissors that should do the job well enough.

Carefully, he started cutting and chopping, feeling a strange kind of satisfaction as he watched the years of unchecked growth fall away into the sink. It felt like being cleansed. Purged of unclean memories. When he had finished with his hair, he started on his straggly beard, cutting as close to his skin as he dared before transfiguring the scissors into a cut-throat razor which he used to finish the job properly. When he was done, he wiped the new condensation from the mirror and as he gazed at his reflection, a slow smile started to creep across his face. That was better, he thought; much better. Much more like the old Sirius, even if his cheekbones did stand out a little more now than they used to and the years had added a few more lines around his eyes. Thirty-six was still young these days though and considering that he hadn't seen sunlight or fresh air in so long, he supposed he wasn't in too bad condition. Certainly not as bad as many others who hadn't been so lucky as to escape from Azkaban.

He shivered involuntarily. Sometimes he wondered how he had managed to hang on to his sanity at all.

As he sank down into the warm bath, letting the water soothe his muscles that still ached a little from his unexpected - though admittedly very bracing - fight with Lupin's alter-ego, his thoughts inevitably began to drift away from himself, from Buckbeak and even from Harry. They were both okay now, for the moment anyway, so at least his breakout had accomplished something besides upping his sentence to something worse than death.

No, at the forefront of his mind at the moment was the woman who waited for him downstairs.

Their history was a long and somewhat complicated one. The first time he met her had been at the sorting ceremony during his first year at Hogwarts.

James, Remus, Peter and himself had hit it off almost instantly. Being young, boisterous and eager to make an impression, they had also all been complete idiots. When they saw old Snivellus with his greasy, black hair and pale, pinched features, he had been too much of a target for them to ignore. It hadn't helped when he had refused to try to make friends with any of the others and had actually gone out of his way to insult almost everyone who made the mistake of approaching him. Calling Lily a filthy mudblood - although how he could have known of her heritage at that time had been a mystery - had been just about the final straw for James and Sirius. The same thought occurred to them both at the same time and they had muttered 'Tardesco!' in unison, causing Snape to trip over his robes and fall flat on his face in front of the whole hall.

That's when Sirius noticed the very pretty, somewhat shy girl who had knelt down to pick up Snape from the floor. Snape hit her away and spat at her to leave him alone as he had struggled to his feet, turned from her and walked confidently to the three-legged stool where the Sorting Hat had barely touched his head before declaring, 'Slytherin!' Snape crept away to the Slytherin house dining table, leaving the girl close to tears as she stood in the waiting line alone.

Sirius had never really understood the wave of fury that had risen up within him as he saw the look on her face. As James was too occupied with trying to pacify - and flirt with - Lily, and with Peter and Remus being too busy almost wetting themselves laughing, it had fallen to Sirius to check if the girl with the huge, sad, soulful but extremely pretty green eyes had been okay.

'You shouldn't waste time worrying about people like him, you know. They deserve to be brought down a peg or two from time to time,' he said. 'He shouldn't have been so horrible to you, especially when you were being nice to him.'

She shrugged her shoulders and wiped her eyes. 'It's okay. It's my fault for fussing him. He hates it when I do that. He's my brother.'

'Your brother? How come you're both in the same year then?'

'We're twins,' she replied softly, pushing her dark hair away from her face.

'Twins?'

'Not identical,' she smiled. Then flushed, as though realising that she hadn't needed to point that out.

'Oh,' said Sirius, still not quite believing that someone so ugly and someone so pretty could possibly be twins. 'And you just let him speak to you like that?'

'He doesn't mean it. Not really. He was lovely to me on the train. He's just nervous about his first day, that's all. I think he was hoping to be in Gryffindor.'

Sirius laughed as he glanced over at the Slytherin table and saw the sour look plastered on Snape's face. He couldn't have thought of anyone who was less likely to end up in Gryffindor. 'Well he's hiding his disappointment well, isn't he?'

She had smiled as her eyes met his. Even though he had only been eleven years old, he had felt something stirring within him. A strange feeling, as though he already knew her from somewhere. There was a familiarity there, like an old friend it takes you a while to place.

'He doesn't mix well with other people. He's always preferred to be on his own. It doesn't work too well when he has a sister who could use his company, especially today. I'm a bit nervous myself.'

'Oh, I'm sure we can do something about that,' Sirius had beamed, flamboyantly bowing down low in front of her before holding out his hand. 'Consider yourself accompanied. Allow me to introduce myself. Mr Sirius Black - charming, witty, sometimes annoying but always attractive wizard extraordinaire, at your service. And your name is…'

'Ariadne,' she had giggled shyly, taking his hand. 'Ariadne Snape.'

'Snape, Ariadne!' Professor McGonagall then called, having bypassed her name for a few moments to allow the poor girl chance to wipe her tears away before having to head up for the Sorting.

'Looks like I'm up,' Ariadne smiled, 'I'll see you later.'

'You bet.'

It had always been that way between them. For a long while, he had considered her more like a sister than anything else. He had even managed to garner himself a bit of a reputation as something of a lovable rogue - love 'em and leave 'em type - among the female students of Hogwarts in the meantime.

But there had always been something special about Ariadne. She couldn't have been more of an antithesis to her brother. It was as though all the good things had been portioned to her, leaving everything negative, sinister and miserable to him. She had been sorted into Gryffindor, just like the Marauders; she was warm, sensitive, caring, generous, though she did share Snape's talent for Potions and Herbology.

But it wasn't until their fifth year that Sirius began to look at her in a whole new light.

In those few years, she had blossomed from beneath the overwhelming shadow of her brother; from a slightly awkward, shy little girl to an almost-sixteen-year-old beauty with the most glossy black hair and the deepest green eyes he had ever seen in his life. Their teasing and boisterousness gradually began to give way to something much deeper and during the summer holidays that year, just after they had both turned sixteen, Sirius realised that he had fallen in love.

Neither of their parents approved of their offspring's choices. Sirius' overbearing mother had screeched and bellowed all over the house for days when she had heard her son was planning on dropping out of Hogwarts when she had always wanted him to finish his N.E.W.T's before moving on to keep up the family tradition of extolling the virtues of the Dark Arts to anyone and everyone who would listen. Ariadne's parents wanted her to have nothing more to do with a boy who had such little regard for his mother's wishes, not to mention the fact they simply didn't believe that he was good enough or ambitious enough to join the Snape dynasty. Ariadne had never been as popular with her parents as her brother anyway, something that Sirius could identify closely with too, and eventually, they both decided that they'd had enough of being nothing but constant disappointments.

Perhaps it hadn't helped much that Ariadne and Sirius had run away together that summer, going to stay with James' parents while they made plans to start their own witchcraft school on some deserted island in the Pacific, found a Quidditch team, be the first people to fly to the moon on a broomstick and other such equally ridiculous ideas that you are prone to believe in when you're sixteen. When they'd come to realise that such dreams were exactly that, sense had dawned and Sirius had bought his own place with the money his Uncle Alphard had left him and for a while, Ariadne had stayed with him while they both finished their N.E.W.T's at Hogwarts.

She had always been destined for bigger and better things though and had soon developed itchy feet after they had left school. She had managed to secure a place at Durmstrang's extremely prestigious graduate programme and had spent a couple of years researching advanced extraction methods for oils from some medicinal herb that Sirius could never remember the name of. It had been one of the hardest things he had ever had to do to let her go. They both figured that it would be a test for them - if they could survive such a prolonged absence from each other, then they could survive anything.

How ironic that all seemed now.

Despite their best intentions, Sirius had lost touch with her as both their lives had developed in their own way, but he had been pleased for her when he had heard that she'd accepted a position with the Ministry's research and development branch. His own path had taken him in a slightly less structured direction.

He had fought tirelessly against the rising forces of the Dark Lord for almost six years within the Ministry's intelligence services, alongside his old school friends James, Remus and Lily. He'd also been a member of the original Order of the Phoenix and had even spent some very uncomfortable, but thankfully short, time spying on the Death Eaters.

A lot of good all those years of service and sacrifice had done him when he had been accused of murdering his friend - and twelve innocent people - in cold blood.

Thinking back, even at that time though, Peter Pettigrew had been reluctant to do anything practical to move against Voldemort's dark forces. Of course, now Sirius understood why. But it was towards the end of that period, just before Lily and James had died, that he had met up with Ariadne again.

In a bookstore, of all places. She had been browsing through the Herbology section while Sirius had been more concerned with trying to get the young witch behind the counter to knock a couple of sickles off 'The Fastest Racing Brooms Ever' in his own charming, inimitable way. He had felt something stir deep within him; something ancient, something long since buried but something extremely powerful when he had noticed her. She'd had something of the old affection in her eyes too, and he couldn't understand how she could possibly have grown so much more beautiful in the four years they had been apart.

They had gone for a cup of coffee together that had turned into an extended lunch that turned into an even longer dinner. They had never talked for so long about everything and nothing - work, Voldemort, Hogwarts, old friends, old times…old loves. Perhaps it had always been fated, perhaps it had been a last attempt to see if what they'd had together had survived the past few years…whatever it was, they had found themselves back at Sirius' home as though drawn there like magnets towards an invisible power; a power so great, so overwhelming that neither of them even tried to resist it.

What they had shared together that night had been more than special. Something within them both had somehow connected and bound them together in a way that most people would never understand. He had fallen in love with her again more quickly and more deeply than before and when she had told him that she still loved him too, everything else that had ever been important in his life just melted away into the background of a landscape where she was the sole source of light and life. They had spent several weeks together, almost forgetting about the first war that was raging on their doorsteps with the Dark Lord.

Until Voldemort had begun to seek out individuals - James, Lily and their newborn son, Harry. Nothing could have prompted Sirius more quickly into action than that, breaking him out of the bubble of false security in which he had cocooned himself. He had practically forgotten that Ariadne had existed when James and Lily had asked him to be their Secret-Keeper. He hadn't confided that information to Ariadne for very good reasons, but it meant that she couldn't understand why he had just run out on her the way he had. He didn't answer her owls, he never tried sending any to her and he never called round at her flat to explain.

The next she had heard about him was from the gossip in Diagon Alley the day after James and Lily had been killed. There was talk about how he had always been a bit too confident for his own good; how he had been seen at the Potters' home just minutes after it had been blown to pieces; how he must always have been a Death Eater and how he had betrayed his best friends to the Dark Lord before hunting down Pettigrew and killing him too.

Despite his reticence and his long, unexplained disappearance, Ariadne had refused to believe that the man she had known and loved since she'd been eleven years old could possibly be responsible for such a horrific crime. She certainly hadn't believed that he would ever have joined Lord Voldemort. She had been the sole voice of defence in his corner. She had written to the Ministry and The Daily Prophet after hearing about his very public arrest, appealing for his right to a trial or, at the very least, a fair hearing; she had been unafraid of voicing her support for him and demonstrating her unwavering, unshakable belief that he had not been responsible for the things of which he had been accused.

It was only after months of badgering the Ministry with more owls than they received usually received in twenty years that eventually, they conceded to allow her to see him.

Her visits had been his one source of light in those days. He remembered the pity in her eyes; her tears; her disbelief that such a thing could have happened - to all of them; her incredulity at the Ministry's point blank refusal to even so much as listen to anything he had to say in his defence, citing the discovery of Pettigrew's finger as all the evidence they needed to see. All they wanted was to lock him away in the deepest, darkest hole they could find and forget that he had ever even existed, as though that could finally shut out the last remaining traces of Voldemort forever.

It had crushed him to see how desperately she had tried to help him and how vociferously and consistently she was being ground down and ignored. Part of him almost wanted her to stop visiting him so that he wouldn't have to see her pain, but there was also a part of him that needed to see her in the way that fish need the ocean or birds need the wind that carries them.

She had continued to visit him for the first few months, until the Dementors had stopped all visitors to Azkaban. Besides, Ariadne had suffered so much for her vocal and active support of him that the wizarding community had shunned her, making it virtually impossible for her to get the supplies she had needed to continue her research. Not long after that, the Ministry had fired her and had just stopped short of accusing her of being in league with You-Know-Who herself. Even Remus had distrusted her, lost as he was in his own unfathomable grief over Lily and James as well as his bitter anger with Sirius. Rejected and abandoned by everyone she had ever regarded as a friend and disillusioned by the futility of her efforts to help him, she had written to Sirius to tell him that she had decided to return to the quiet hillsides of the Lake District, to the home her godmother had left her in her will - the only place where she felt she belonged anymore. She had promised to write to him every single day, and for a short while she had, but the Dementors even stopped the owls. They didn't want the inmates to experience even that small light of hope.

That's when he had truly given up.

He was going to be in that cell for the rest of his life. There was no one left to help him. No one who cared. No one who would ever believe what he had to say. No one who even wanted to remember him. He was nothing more than a horrific memory to be buried in the past and forgotten. It was all over.

In that moment of realisation, his despair had been absolute and it had been the one and only time during those entire twelve years that he had wept.

Sirius had kept every one of her letters. He had hidden them beneath his tattered prison robes, safe from discovery by the Dementors, but he had reluctantly been forced to leave them behind when he had escaped. He had regretted that bitterly over the course of the year he spent at the Shrieking Shack, but now he realised that perhaps they had already served their full purpose. They had kept him alive, kept his hope burning during his darkest moments.

But he wasn't in the dark anymore.

Those letters were never going to be needed again.