Chapter 16

Trelawney slept in a small single bed in the Astronomy tower. The noise of the other professors and students, the clamor of their thoughts and impulses and probabilities, had clouded her eye, she said. Living with the Sight was its own reward, and made the desire for a set of rooms seem shallow. What she took for herself, then, was a folding cot that she had had since her youth, and a place at one side of her classroom, a curved length of wall, where she huddled under a purple velvet blanket, her face to the wall, in parenthesis.

Asceticism was her response to the other excess in her life – the vain pleasure she took from the awe and regard for the mystical that people laid at her feet. Others who lacked the Sight feared it, idolized it or disregarded it entirely, but she took each response in very much the same way, because ultimately from her vantage point they were similar. Each one was at heart made of distance and misunderstanding. But each one gave her tools to compose herself with, and an unspeaking hidden part of her welcomed this, as she had been a shy girl and had always felt out of place.

The Sight even took her shyness and cast it in a new form, as the backdrop to her uniqueness and the special burden of her vision; and (to her secret disgust) the apologetic and nervous nature she'd had as a girl had transformed into something that to all but her resembled humility. And she would subtly imply that the bareness of her existence was to leave space for visions of the infinite, so that their wonders would have a suitable vessel. That worldly comforts muddied the waters. That those gifted with visions were used to an indifferent or even hostile public – that they were comfortable with suffering.

And somehow, it became true. It was the punishment she felt she deserved, for the half-truths and the false stature she had attained, her place in the world that she could take no credit for.

It was worse, now, because Harry had returned. She had dreamed his vanishing one night when he was a child and breathed an unworthy sigh of relief, because it meant that her vision of his future would not ruin at least one person's life with dread and sacrifice and being robbed of the present, which, as any seer will tell you, is the most precious of all things. She knew that if he had returned from somewhere presumably ignorant of what his place was in things, what his future was to be, that people who knew of it would not be able to resist that most foolish (to her mind) and human of foibles, the desire to know the endings of things before reaching them, and that they would lay this burden upon him, destroying his present, his presence in the moment, and (since our essences exist only in the now) his mortal momentary soul, and forcing him into a hollow simulation of life, a rote narration, always looking to the future and putting off living until the climactic foreseen moment had passed, only to find that life itself had passed with the moment. Her dream meant that he was free, for whatever uncertain amount of time, to have his moments for himself, and that his life, however short, would be unfettered by an indelible path.

But the night after she found out that Harry had returned, she woke from a fitful sleep, laced with perspiration, and stumbled out of bed, somewhat disoriented, until she stopped at the center of her room and found herself facing them all. Empty seats, in concentric rows, rising up into the dimness of the room, but their emptiness was no less an accusation, a place holder for the dead that she had seen, the deaths her students were forced to imagine, that she encouraged them to augur into being as fears, as care, as a frisson of worry to warn of the transient, cruel and purposeless nature of life.

She was judged and found guilty. Her being, her now neglected momentary soul, felt pressed thin, as between slides of glass, a sliver of her starkly vivisected, and she became aware for the first time in years of her feelings, in a burst of inward perception that was dreadfully clear in a way that no vision had ever been. The feeling of guilt was unbearable to her, a brittle and crushing feeling in her chest, and she knew, with a harsh clarity, that she could not live with it.

So it is that any story you tell yourself enough times will ultimately become like the truth to you, and the next morning she found herself telling the lie again to her reflection in the mirror, that her vision was a gift, a bitter one perhaps but a precious rarity, and, though painful for those who lacked the ability to know themselves, it was the stark light of truth, which could never be silenced.

It was in this way that she did not end her life.

•

What a load of monkey bollocks. I heard this story from the woman herself. Oh, it wasn't right away. The first thing that happened when she walked into the infirmary and saw me was that she had no idea who I was, and the second thing was that Ginny introduced us with a slightly wry expression on her face, and the third thing was that she shouted, "no, no, you can't," and then wilted like an orchid under a blowtorch. It was only when she was revived and had demanded that the others leave the room for a moment in an elaborately fluttery way that she told me that story, seemingly apropos of nothing.

All right, so I hadn't been around very long but I hadn't been knitted yesterday, and I knew that nobody could tell the whole truth and her account was as fraught with drama as anyone else's, if not more so, but there was some degree of truth in it. And I wasn't happy to be away from Sirius, having just met the man again, and I'll get back to that, really, things didn't happen in the order I'm telling them but what can I do, but anyway I had some time to kill before the doctor returned from fixing the tender limbs of neophyte broom-riders, and there was something important from this, something I needed to know about. Before I was born this woman had had a fit and babbled a bit of bad poetry at a job interview in a pub that apparently defined my destiny. I wanted to ask her a few questions and maybe try to make sense out of this before I figured out how to turn her into a toilet seat or something.

You see, she was sorry, if only for an evening, that she had sent around twenty years' worth of hapless students of the dubious art of fortune-telling into a long woozy nightmare of apprehension – a twilight-sleep nightmare, where everything was ambiguous and vaguely threatening and hard to awaken from. And she should have been sorry. But what she wasn't sorry about was more my concern.

After her story was told, with a lot of fanning of hands and scarf-waving (apparently her ascetic existence allowed for a preponderance of scarves, which maybe drew in and entangled the more obscure strands of prophecy like they seemed to do with her frizzy brown and gray hair), I put my hand up to stop her talking. I think in my moment of marshalling my thoughts and my restraint I must have closed my eyes and looked thoughtful, because she said, "Dear boy. Are you Seeing something?"

I could even hear the capital letter.

My unfriendly look made her silent.

"Do you know what I find suspect?" I said.

She shook her head slowly.

"You resent me. The fact that I'm here causes you problems of conscience."

"My conscience is clean," she said.

"That's probably because you don't keep it on you. You've got it locked up in a tower somewhere so that it won't get dirty. The problem is that you didn't stay up there with it. Don't you realize what you've done to me?"

"My boy, I have done nothing –"

"Nothing except tell a man that I would be the one to kill an evil wizard, and that one of us would have to die. Kind of giving away the ending, don't you think?"

"The truth…the truth," she said, "is often painful, but it cannot be denied."

"Okay. Assuming that you're right about the future, and I am having a hard time with assuming that right now, and if I am to take you at your word that you were glad I wasn't going to be around because my life would not be turned into a series of inevitable steps, then why would you have said anything about it to begin with? If my being self-determining is so important to you, then why wouldn't you let things unfold as they would instead of meddling with my life? Oh, wait, I know, you wanted a job."

"Professor Dumbledore…demanded proof, I couldn't expect him to accept me on faith alone –"

"So you put up my life as collateral. A small trade for bed and board and a bully pulpit."

"But it was all the truth!" She was pleading. "You are the one! It was never the Longbottom boy. Only while You-Know-Who thought it was, but now that you're back, it has to be you. If you had stayed away it would still be Longbottom."

"Who's You-Know-Who?" I said.

"The dark lord, boy!"

"So because he thinks it's me, it is?"

"Yes. That is how the prophecy –"

"Who told him the prophecy?"

"I…I'm not certain. The dark lord has resources –"

"It doesn't really matter, though – he wouldn't have come for me if he hadn't heard it, though, isn't that so?"

She was quiet.

"And he knows I'm back?"

No answer but a short, trembling nod.

"Who told him I was back?" Actually I had an answer for that, in the back of my head. Or in the back of someone else's head. Yeah. Maybe. "Never mind. That can't be helped now. The point is, if I hadn't come back…"

I was having a thought.

"If I hadn't come back…"

It was a little slow to congeal.

"If I hadn't come back, then they would never have been able to kill him."

What the hell.

"They would have died trying, but he would have come back, because I would have been alive."

I became aware of the boniness of her face, the spareness of her. She'd been made by someone stingy about materials and not overly concerned with quality.

"And you knew this, of course," I said. "But you also knew how miserable you would feel to have to face me again. The one time you were right, and you couldn't bear to be. Now you could have done the right thing a long time ago and not said anything about what you saw in my future, and you know what would have happened? No Molly in a coma, no scar on my head, no abduction, no Ginny in the Chamber, no Neville carrying this horrible burden…"

I felt both worse and better, which was about right for me. It was all lousy and no mistake, but I was fairly certain it wasn't my fault. It wasn't my FAULT!

"But that would have required ethics," I said," which you don't have. You're only in this for yourself."

She was smaller, somehow, in front of me. Her shoulders shrank, and her eyes seemed overlarge on her face, and I was for a brief moment reminded of Pella.

"I have a suggestion," I said. "Why don't you go find something to do that doesn't wreck other people's lives?"

She left rapidly, her shoes smacking annoyingly on the stone floor. It was one of those sounds that makes you mad for no reason at all. Great, I thought. She gets the last word. Smack, smack, smack, smick, smack, smick, smack. I hated that.

•

I skipped something here. My apologies. It's just that the whole business with Trelawney really, really irritated me, and I wanted to get past it sooner. I probably should have begun with getting out of the chamber, and what it was like to try to squeeze a little talk out of any of the people I was with.

We made our way out of the chamber, Ginny at my right and Sirius at my left. Hermione paused only to pull a small shriveled thing from the ashes of the fire and cradle it carefully in her hands, and Ron took a moment to look at the giant snake bones nearby before shaking his head and saying, "Bloody hell, Neville," in a low voice. I was a little woozy and so mostly what I noticed was the bony strength of Sirius' hands and the tender grip of Ginny's, and the dark and coolness, and the faint dripping sounds surrounding us.

One of the difficult things about being able to hear someone's thoughts is trying not to when you really want to. And although a part of me wanted to ask Sirius a myriad of questions, I really, really wanted to know how Ginny was doing, but I knew I wasn't supposed to take it from her. We'd had a talk about that, which I will get to, but even if we hadn't I still knew it was a bad idea to listen in on her thoughts. Her strength and her sense of self were built on control of who she was and the ability to protect herself. In a slightly drunken way, my mind kept reorienting on how she'd come down there for the first time in years, to the place of her nightmares, just to find me and bring me out, and it kept twisting in me, folding something over in my chest, and I found myself tearing up as I looked at her determined profile, at her perfect willful nose, and I mean willful, it made me think of the curves in wrought iron, of that metal thing on the front of a locomotive that keeps things off the track, my but that was poetic, I'd have to remember that one and whisper it to her breathily someday and maybe I'd get lucky, must still be a little woozy, get lucky indeed, where'd I hear that stupid expression, and the thought of being with her in that way, out of nowhere, stirred me powerfully with its sweetness, and I stumbled a little, because I felt it in my lower back, and she was immediately there to prop me up, her hip against mine and her arm under my shoulder and around my back, and it was a lot to take, a lot to bear, desire and sympathy and respect and the need to comfort, everything, and I had to say something, anything.

So I said to Sirius, "Didn't you used to have a dog?"

The way they flanked and supported me made me remember the morning hugs I would often give Molly and Arthur, when I would find them together in the kitchen, making breakfast, on a short tether to each other. She would be bustling over the stove or floating dishes from the cupboard, and sometimes he would make tea or help with the cooking but often enough he would just be there, like a balloon tied to the wrist of a child, his restored height still new to him and making him unconsciously angle his head down, as though it would bump the ceiling. I could always find them together and so it was always a simple matter of opening both arms and scooping them both into an embrace. Molly would continue what she was doing but say something welcoming, and Arthur would pat my back in a way that softened his height, recalling a shadow of who he'd been for so long. Together in one lump they had been infuriating and lovable, and separate they were the same but differently distributed, though in general far less infuriating as they had dropped the habit of confining me to the present - like being sent to my room without any history, in a way.

"I'll show you later," he said. We were passing statues of snakes.

"Must be an old dog."

"It feels that way," he said.

I figured that would have to wait.

"Gin," I said, lowering my voice.

"Later," she said, not looking at me.

Okay, then, that too would have to wait. I stumbled a little over some debris as I turned my head to find the unspeakable. "Hermione?"

"What is it, D-Deasil?" She spoke haltingly. Probably trying to keep her feet under her. We were approaching what looked like the wrong end of a sewer pipe. Surrounding its entrance (or rather, exit) were countless skeletons of small animals.

The first one's always silent, I thought to myself.

"Have you figured out what the –"

"Not here," she said quickly.

Huh.

"Ron?"

"Yeah," he said. There was a weight in his voice. Not sure if it was anger or fatigue or what.

"Never mind," I said.

"None of us is helping, eh?" Sirius said.

"Not one of you," I said. "I should have walked back by myself."

"As if you could have," Ginny said. She had a point – I was still stiff and weak.

"But wouldn't it have been better for –"

"Later," she said again.

"Had you done this before? The apparating business," Sirius asked.

"Yes, he has," Hermione said, answering for me.

When she didn't elaborate, Ron said, "There have been a few times when he –"

"Ron!" Hermione said.

"What is it, Hermione?" He sounded a little tired.

"Now is not the time," she said quietly.

"This is ridiculous," I said. "Nobody can complete a thought around here. All right then, how about this. So, Sirius, I hear you were in prison and I gather it was wrongfully so, so I'm glad you're out. I'd like to say I missed you, but I don't really remember much about anything, but I'll bet if I could, then I would. I mean if I could remember anything, then I'd have missed you. Ginny, thanks for coming. I never would have asked that of you, but I can see that's not the point. Whatever the point may be or end up being, that isn't. Uh, it. Hermione, thank you as well for coming, though I have to say you're being a little weird, and I've just seen a lot of weird so I know it when I see it, though it is surely a question of degree, and I don't want to make you think that I think you're being really weird because of what 'a little weird' must mean to me as opposed to most people. Ron…I think you are a little unsure as to how to feel about all this, and me in particular, but I'm wondering, just wondering, if that precludes our finding a pub fairly soon after we're out of this Gothic sewer."

After a pause, I heard his voice somewhere behind me. "No, it doesn't."

"Ronald!"

"Give it a rest, love," he said to Hermione. "I'm not going to punish him. He's been having a rough time of it."

"How do you know what 'Gothic' is?" Ginny asked.

"Later," I said.

•

Okay, so after that, and after that abrasive pas de deux with the mystical Madame laFuture, and in the wake of her quivery departure, my fellow intrepid sewer divers began to tentatively peek in the doorway, or anyway, Hermione peeked, Ron looked questioningly, and then Ginny and Sirius barged in and came right to me, where I was seated on a bed in the corner holding my head. It wasn't hurting, or actually it was hurting but not in any magically-induced way, just the old familiar nothing-makes-any-sense way.

"Are you all right?" Ginny said. Her voice was round with sympathy and her hand fell on my shoulder, rousing me from where I was.

"I'll get to that," I said. I spent a split second looking into her eyes, trying not to hear anything or tell anything, just to look at her, and feel a bit cheated, for reasons we have not yet gotten into, before looking away to Sirius.

The light of the medical wing was not doing him any favors.

I hadn't had anyone give me any dictates about not looking too closely at the man, not letting myself see what was there, not having impressions, or feeling one way or the other about it for that matter, so I did just that.

It was an aspect of him, a character to his gaze, that I couldn't make sense of, because I'd never seen it before. It looked like the inevitable was approaching, and it was an unequivocal horror, something that was unbearable, or should have been unbearable, that should have destroyed one's mind and soul, that should have been the most horrific nightmare conceivable - but for the knowledge (which was the thing I saw in his eyes) that it would be inexorably lived through, that even against one's will it would be survived, and returned to the next day, perhaps slightly different but still excruciatingly horrible. And that as terrible as the horror that was coming would be, it was the continuing that was the worst of it. This is what the prison had done to him: it showed him that the worst thing imaginable was just living. One day following another.

"I know I don't look well," he said.

"Did I say anything?" I said.

"You didn't have to say anything."

I didn't have to say anything.

If someone does something wrong, something terrible, and we are mad at them, we punish them. If someone does something wrong and we want it not to happen again, we teach them what was wrong about it, get them to really understand it, and then what? It would follow that we let them go afterwards because if we didn't, and they just stayed in a prison somewhere, we wouldn't know if we'd taught them, if they'd learned anything, if the problem were solved – and we'd really just be throwing them away because we couldn't figure out what to do about them and didn't want to think about it anymore.

Sirius got thrown away.

All I could remember of him was an idea, really, a small child's construct of memory, made out of feelings, and senses other than sight. A diaphanous impression of safety, of knowing that fear would end, and that I would not fall. I knew nothing about him as a man. He could have been a hero or a bastard. What I knew was that this fundament in my mind that made it through fourteen years of forced forgetting came from a man, and that that man had been scored and ground down until his bones showed, until his face had become more human-like than human, and regardless of what he might have done, there was nothing, nothing at all good that would ever come from his time in a cell.

"I plan to get over it," he said.

I wanted to know what put him there, so that whatever it was, I could disable it like a bomb, field-strip it like a rifle, dismantle it like a government. Or, quite possibly, destroy it utterly, like a lightning bolt striking a fencepost.

"Can you talk about this?" I said.

"Can you?" he said.

I immediately felt like a whiny, over-sensitive, bleeding-hearted something-or-other. Whatever it would be that would possess all of those qualities in a signature sort of way, such that if one were looking for all of them in a tidy package, someone helpful would point them in my direction without hesitation.

Looking at my hands, I said, "I'm up for whatever you are."

"Harry…" he said. With what were audible creaks and pops, he sank down so he could look me in the eye. "What happened to me is over."

Everything I wanted to say, amazingly enough, didn't make it out. Things like "Doesn't look like it's over," or "But it'll take years for you to get over that," or "If you looked any more haunted there'd be, you know, a mist and weird lights and chains and, er, other – spooky… accoutrements – I'm babbling, right? Hi there, I'm Deasil," you know, helpful crap like that.

"Whereas what is happening to you…" he said.

It was a pregnant pause, a waddling, six-week-overdue pregnant pause, a post-fart-at-the-coronation pause.

"Is just getting started," I said.

"Wh-…" Ginny said. She looked at Sirius like he'd… well, like he'd said the ugly truth instead of breaking it to me gently.

"I knew this was a bad idea," Hermione said.

"Why don't you ask Deasil what he thinks?" Ron said.

Honestly, it was all I could do to catch up. Still didn't know what kind of a guy Sirius was. Still wasn't clear on the weird stuff from Hermione. Was increasingly irritated at the bind I was in with Ginny, which I'll get to in a little bit. But it was important to find out what it was that I thought about all of this, and all of it, and him.

I had no idea. So I thought I'd sort of plunge in a direction and see if I hit my head.

"You're on to something," I said to him.

He didn't smile at me. Not even a little. His mouth didn't move. The lines in his face did not bend in the slightest. But I liked how dark his eyes were. And I guessed that in lieu of smiling, that was what would happen. You'd like some part of him. And that seemed like a lot to get from him.

So I was all right with it.

Hermione was still snarking in the background. "Not four days out of prison, and in a school, no less, and around all these … sensitive matters, with absolutely no –"

"You don't trust what you can't quantify," Sirius said without looking at her, without his face changing at all.

It was something in his tone that completely silenced her.

"Much less what you can't comprehend," he said. "And there's nothing in your Ministry-approved library of so-called mysteries that would begin to make you understand me."

"Hermione, he is innocent, remember?" Ron said off in the room somewhere.

"Was," Sirius said.

Her voice, after a pause, was like pebbled glass. "I realize, I – I know it had to have been awful, more awful that I can know, and I know I'm slow to trust –" At that I almost looked at her. "- but I'm only thinking of what's – what's…" She stopped short of saying "best" or "right", I imagined, probably realizing she had no idea what that was or might be.

"There's nothing I can say. I'm sorry, Mister Black," she said.

"I've been getting that a lot," he said.

This time I liked his nose a little. It wasn't large but it sort of came at you. It looked like the beginning of an argument.

"You were imprisoned because they thought you killed me," I said.

"Yes," he said. "Easy enough mistake for my best friends to make."

Not over that yet. Check. "Why did they make it?"

"They were fooled by another one of their best friends, who – unlike me – was an utter heap of shit."

"They seem like such bright people," I said.

"Over-generous with their good will."

"How did it happen?" I said. I was hoping to corral his ire a little, to maybe use it for rocket fuel to propel the story along so I could begin to figure this out.

"We had this – I won't call him a friend, he was more of an ankle-biter. Peter Pettigrew." Contempt. "Not smart like Remus or James, not adventurous like we all were. He just needed people around him, to tell him who to be and what to do. I didn't think he was capable of doing anything at all on his own. We let him tag along at school, let him in our little clique, let him feel important because he was with us. As if that would be such a great thing. As if we were anything more than cocky young bastards, full of ourselves and convinced of our own brilliance." He paused to cough. I guessed he hadn't used his voice this much in a long while, and I wondered what it would be like to be quiet, day after day, because there was no one at all to talk to.

"And it's not that he had no ability as a wizard. He managed a few major spells that James and I had worked on for a year or more. He was like a wand, really. He could function, if he were pointed at something."

He conjured a low seat and made himself more comfortable. When he settled he became very still, like he'd been there forever. It seemed that he was accustomed to not moving.

"When the war began in earnest, he was terrified. It seemed like he couldn't make up his mind whether to cling to our robes or hide, or so we thought. He was disappearing all of the time. After you were attacked, he fell into a deep depression, and started drinking more than usual. He said it was because James and Lily had chosen the wrong secret-keeper, that he hadn't been up to the task, that he was weak and someone must have read his mind, that he'd nearly gotten you killed and that Molly was as good as dead. Clearly he was wrong about that." His hair was very dark and shiny, as if his head had been doused in water. "And everything else he lied about. He was despondent because his true master had vanished, and all of the betrayal and the machinations he'd put into place were pointless. He'd broken his bonds with us because he thought we would be defeated, and when you banished Voldemort from his body he had no hole left to crawl back into."

"When I banished…"

Hermione said, "Actually we don't know exactly-"

"Nearer Harry than anyone else," Sirius said.

"My mother had a lot to do with it," Ginny said at my side.

Sirius was still for a moment.

"You have a point, girl," he said.

Huh.

"So the war had found Peter losing his taste for life, and developing his taste for alcohol," Sirius said, stretching the last word out like it was a little pain that he wanted to last. "Any shit pub, the darker the better. We dragged him out of a fair few. The one he favored was not far from your home."

Oh, come on, I thought. There's got to be more than one shit pub around the British Isles, I mean what are the odds? Is it really possible that every bad thing in my life is centered on one miserable drunk-tank in Scotland? No, now, let me not get ridiculous.

Sirius was looking at me. His gaze was not a light thing. It was practically like someone leaning on me. "What?" he said.

It was too early to take points from him.

"Forget it," I said. "You were saying."

After a moment he sighed and coughed. "He was in the pub the night your home was attacked. Tossing back a few while his master."

It was as if someone put their hand on a record, stopping it.

A moment passed.

"While his master went to kill the Potter family. A little numbing of his conscience, to pass the time. He'd drink, and then turn into a rat."

"So he told someone about the… no, you lost me."

"Peter could transform himself," Sirius said.

"Okay."

"Then he'd –" He looked at me again. I'm saying it was like him resting his weight on my forehead. "Peter could transform himself into a rat."

"That was it." I nodded.

"He would drink, and then transform, and his mind would become simpler, and the alcohol would have a stronger affect on him. It also got him out of paying his tab. So he'd had a couple of shots, and then transformed when no one was looking, and was lying along the bottom of the bar, probably soaking himself with spilled whiskey. Then he overheard some drunks talking about a prophecy and began to… what is it?"

My head was in my hands. That woman. I hoped the pay at Hogwarts was terrible.

"Just life," I said. "I've heard a bit of this part. He heard a bunch of drunken douchebags talking about a prophecy that was made before I was born."

"What's a douchebag?" he said.

"Magical people don't have those," Hermione said, being helpful. "They just use charms for… sorry."

I was glad my gaze could at least bring some things to a close. "It's a derogatory term, and we'll get into it later. People used to say it… sometime. I don't know when. I don't know why I remember it. I don't really know why it's a … in any event, I know what he heard. I also know that Arthur Weasley wandered in around that time in a very suggestible state brought on by the shock of having his wife in his head with him and heard those self-same assholes – wizards do have assholes, don't they?"

"Every one does and they're all about the same," he said before Hermione could help.

He had nice sideburns for a man fresh out of prison.

"Those self-same assholes," I said, "thought it would be funny to send Arthur on a little bit of a fool's errand, I mean it was sort of the ultimate fool's errand, the woman was always talking over my shoulder, and I only figured out the other day it was because she thought one of them was standing there, only invisible, and they also told him it would be good if I forgot every day that passed, and so I was brought up to be sort of nothing, you know, a brand new empty slate every day, like a… a beer can from an endless six-pack, always the same, and I don't know how I could have grown up or anything, and I didn't even remember women, I mean the second one I met knocked me out, I mean I literally…"

"Breathe," he said.

As it turned out that was a good idea. "Okay, you're up," I said.

"I didn't know what the prophecy was," he said. If dragging a lead pipe across concrete could be said to have a pleasant quality, it would be in the same sense that his voice did. "James and Lily kept it from me. At first I only knew that a prophecy existed, but gradually I gathered that it was about you, but they refused to talk about it. We fought about that. I wanted to know so that I could help to protect you, and they wanted to keep it secret from everyone. I tried to explain that I had ways of hiding you that they had no inkling of, due to my connections as head of a dark family, but in the end my insistence only led them to believe I might not be on their side. Since they couldn't depend on a werewolf to safeguard their secrets, and since they no longer trusted me, they turned to the one person they could rely on – their old friend Peter."

"They were afraid–" Hermione said.

"Worst thing about fighting terrorists," Sirius said. "Fear makes you lose your common sense.

"So Peter has given their location to his master and then gone to the pub to try not to think about what he's done to his friends, and he hears a garbled version of the prophecy, and pieces it together, and realizes something: he's never going to be free of Voldemort. He's just given Voldemort the location of the only person who can defeat him, and obviously the infant will be killed easily, and so the deal he made out of fear is one he will have to endure for the rest of his life. He hates his master and he hates his friends. He hates James and Lily because it's either that or admit he's as good as killed them. He hates me because I always looked down on him and he's afraid of me. He hates himself, in his miserable rat heart, because he's pathetic and fearful, and he's made the wrong decision about who to stand by. He feels the mark given to him by Voldemort burning on his arm, and he is filled with dread. The drinking does its work and he passes out in a dark corner.

"When he wakes up everyone's celebrating. Voldemort's dead. He can't believe it. By some miracle the prophecy appears to be true, and the child has become the Boy-Who-Lived, and for a moment Peter thinks he's free.

"Then he realizes that the people surrounding him aren't his friends anymore. They don't know what he's done, and they can never learn the truth about what he is – a traitor. He has escaped a lifetime of dread and powerlessness for one with different varieties of the same. He's left himself with no escape route.

"So he hangs on, and some years go by. He's too afraid of dying to kill himself, but he hates himself and everyone else too much to live. When James and Lily try to help him, thinking that he still feels guilty for the attack on Harry, he rejects them. When Remus and I come to get him out of a bar or a dungeon, he just sneers at us. He's just waiting for the drinking to catch up with him and maybe kill him, if he's lucky."

For a moment, I thought of the man in front of me hunched over in a dark cell, wishing for his own death. I wasn't sure if the thought was from within him or if it just appeared in my head, but I was pretty sure he'd thought about it when he was in prison, and cursed himself for his weakness.

I didn't. Curse him, I mean. His being here, solid and himself, made him seem miraculous to me. I thought to myself, I would have died. I would have dried up and crumbled.

His voice startled me a little. "Then one night, around four years after Voldemort vanished, two things happened. One was that Arthur Weasley vanished, along with you. And the other thing was that Peter felt a sharp burning pain on his forearm.

"He knew that it could only mean that his master was not dead, and that Peter would surely pay for what he had done, one way or another.

"So he decided that if he were well and truly buggered, then he would not go down alone. He would do as much damage as possible to the people who he blamed for his misfortune. And that is what he did. He waited until it was James' turn to retrieve him from a pub, and he made sure to mumble a bit about being afraid and keeping secrets before passing out on the couch in the parlor. While James and Lily were sleeping, he broke into their dungeon and stole back his master's wand, which he'd found during his forays as a rat, and then left. He wrote them a letter saying that I had been the one who told Voldemort where their house was because I had taken the information from Peter's mind. Peter had been too weak to stop me then and I had threatened to kill him if he told them about it. The Blacks had been a dark family for generations, and my true nature had revealed itself. I had stolen Voldemort's wand back and taken Harry to sacrifice him so that Voldemort could return, and killed Arthur because he had gotten in the way. Peter hoped that the letter would reach them in time but I was after him now.

"Immediately thereafter, he wrote a letter to me. It contained most of what I've told you. He said that my friends didn't trust me, and that we were both alone. He knew the prophecy and felt the mark burn and Harry was gone, so he was convinced that Voldemort would win in the end. He said that I would die in prison knowing that my best friends thought I had betrayed them and killed their son for Voldemort."

He paused for a moment, conjuring water in a glass and drinking it. His simple movements, his tending to his own needs, his life outside. What was gone for so long, but was now his again, in deliberate motions, with nothing wasted.

"The parchment burned up in my hands and was gone forever," he said.

Lousy, I thought.

"I wasn't thinking very clearly, but I did manage to notice that the owl was a Hogwarts owl with the school circlet around one leg, and so I went there to find him. I'd been through the school and had almost given up when I remembered the house we went to when Remus was changing. I charged in without a thought in my head and found myself waking up some time later with my wand at my feet, burn marks on the walls, and nothing left of Peter but a finger. Naturally it was the middle one."

"He'd blown himself up?"

"With my wand."

"Someone could tell?"

"The Priori Incantatem spell shows what the last spell a wand cast was."

"Uhhh…"

"What are you thinking?" he said.

"Was it in good shape?"

"What's that?"

"The finger."

"How do you mean?"

"Burnt up? Ashy? Nail broken?"

"Not that I remember." He was remembering a sheared-off digit in his hand, an extra, like a visual pun for something.

I wasn't reading his mind – I could just tell.

"So it was in pretty good condition?"

"I suppose."

"What kind of explosive spell leaves only a single undamaged middle finger behind?"

My buddy, the room-clearing silence.

"I thought of that as well, for all the good it did," he said. "A few moments later the room was full of Aurors, I was stunned and carried off, and people stopped listening to anything I said."

"Hermione," I said, not looking away from him, "how are you feeling?"

"Like a world-class idiot," she said from behind me. Her voice was a little muffled, as if her hand were covering her face.

"Just checking," I said. "Sirius, she's one of the two smartest people I know and she's heard all of this before and she still didn't..."

"Who's the other one?" Ron said, before grunting in pain.

"No one wanted to know," Sirius said. "No veritaserum, barely any trial. When they stood me up in the courtroom, I couldn't even turn to see James and Lily, though I knew they were there. There were no arguments, and after I called them all stupid bastards I was not allowed to speak. Dumbledore made quick work of it all. The last daylight I'd seen had been the afternoon before I went after Peter. I couldn't remember what any of it looked like. Not if it were bright, overcast or raining." His words were slowing. "I was stunned and taken away. The next time I opened my eyes it was to a stone ceiling."

I heard Hermione's breath leave her.

He became even more still. A voice came from his general direction, more a sound from nature than a voice, because voices have feeling.

"My time passed.

"And from my cell, I had no way of finding out what had happened to you."

I was going to have to save my feelings for later.

"And then someone figured it out," I said.

"A man came to my cell one day. I heard him through the slit in the door. He said he was here to represent me, that he knew I was innocent, and that I'd be out within the week. I said nothing to him. I was a dog at the time. He was the first person who'd spoken to me in years. I'd forgotten my cell had a door. He said he understood my silence, and he'd be back with further news.

"Two days later he said I should prepare myself to leave the next day. He was trying to avoid having me appear in court, because he thought I wouldn't want to be around all of those people. He was right about that.

"The following day my door opened. The man stood outside. There were no aurors, no dementors. He didn't have a wand out. He was a little short, I think, though it's hard for me to really judge. I hadn't seen anyone else in fourteen years. To me he was tall enough. I was scared of him. He had to come in and get me to go out. We went to the portkey point and he took me to Dunstanburgh Castle, up on the coast of England. I got cleaned up and I slept for a day or so, and he had me looked over and given a large number of strengthening and replenishing potions. When I was well enough to move around easily by myself, he came to my room and gave me a pouch. It contained a large number of galleons and a map of Britain, and it was of a slightly curious design, in that it appeared to be made to be carried, not by a man, but by a dog.

"I didn't have to ask who had paid for the barrister or who had gotten me out of prison. I thanked the man, and shortly after he left the room, I collected my things, transformed, managed to get the pouch strap over my head and left.

"I wandered at first. Not too concerned about going anywhere, just wanting to be outside, see trees and run when I could. I changed into a man to eat, and sometimes to sleep in a bed, and sometimes to walk, but it was easier as a dog. Sometimes I'd read about myself in the newspaper, and it made it harder to return, because often the story would be 'ex-convict Sirius Black has disappeared' or some such fear-mongering nonsense. But I knew I couldn't stay away forever. It was only a couple of weeks, really, and then I found myself crouching as a dog on the edge of the Potter grounds, looking at James sitting alone in the garden with his head in his hands. He was distracted enough that I was able to go right up to him without his noticing."

"What did you do?" I said.

"I lifted up my leg and pissed on his robes."

"You do make an impression," I said.

"I'll go along with that," Ron said. "The first thing he said to me when we met was, 'Let's see your sodding rat.' I thought it was prison slang or something. I hadn't had a rat in years…"

It was one of those pauses that Ron regretted creating.

"But your father," Sirius said, "is not a fool, at least not any more. The first thing he said to me was."

I waited.

"The first thing he said was, 'I can get down lower if it will help.'"

My dad was clearly someone to be reckoned with. He was someone I wanted to learn from. Even if he'd been completely wrong about Sirius, and an utter jackass to Snape, he'd figured out somewhere along the line what to say to people.

"I transformed and told him he couldn't get any lower than he was. He agreed. We went on from there. I'm not going to say things are all settled between your parents and myself. I won't tell you I don't hate them at all anymore for what they helped to happen. But we aren't yelling or fighting anymore. And we know who made this all happen. And I know what's happened since I've been gone."

I was a little slow, but not entirely. And you know, it wasn't that much weirder than my former aunt. "I remember you from when I was very little," I said. "You were… I don't know how else to say this, Sirius. You were a good dog."

Ginny cleared her throat and I felt her hand on my shoulder. Sirius bowed his head slightly, as if he were reading my shirt.

"I looked in on you before I left the grounds the other day," he said. "Grown up, and powerful. The blanket was swirling around in the air over you as you slept. Lily said that had taken some getting used to, but it just meant you were dreaming."

"Merlin," Hermione said.

"I have no use for Merlin," Sirius said. "It's not as if he came to me in the prison offering succor. Nobody came." He paused. When his lip curled slightly it was like watching a giant iceberg chip off of a glacier, which I couldn't ever recall seeing, but there it was. "Only one thought, of one person, stayed with me. One person who mattered, who wasn't bloody useless, who didn't betray me, who deserved."

Yes, that's another period. His sentence stopped that abruptly, and his face was again utterly still. After some invisible subterranean process he spoke again.

"Who deserved justice, who needed to be all right, so that then I."

I'd never heard anything like it.

"Then I would be all right."

He was silent.

Then it was as if the wind were blowing through him, a listless scarecrow, filling his paper lungs for one hoarse, rasping word.

"Harry."

"But why…" I dreaded this. "Why didn't you just hate me too?"

"What am I, Snape?" he said.

•

A/N: This chapter has to stop here. I have another few little arcs in the air, I know, like for instance what's going on between D and Ginny right now, and what's going on with Dumbledore, but when I reached the end of Sirius and D's conversation, I realized that I didn't want to follow it with anything. Until the next chapter, anyway. Thanks to Jules for her attention to character and referring to Sirius as "Basil Exposition", to Freja for her good humor and awareness, and to Phil, Jonathan, Chuck, moshpit and the others at Metafic for being interested and gracious and telling me not to change Deasil's voice. You win. Well, I don't think I really could have, but you win anyway.