Sirius gets the motivation he needs to make his great escape
PLEASE NOTE: There are several mild warnings for this chapter, but other than being from a POV of a somewhat unreliable narrator who is depressed and has a fair amount of self loathing, I don't think there's any content that's too terribly shocking. Please feel free to scroll down and check the TWs at the end though first if there's any risk! Better safe than sorry
On a freezing sleet-battered rock in the North Sea, in a dripping puddling cell full of so much standing water it was starting to generate its own miniature ecosystem, a man seethed. Just because he had read the words with his own eyes didn't mean they were the truth. Everything here was some form or another of torture - just because it had been a while since the last time they'd tried to trick him with cruel lies and false hopes didn't mean they had necessarily given up entirely on that particular avenue of torment. It was, however, one of the more… unusual lies they'd tried to slip past him, and that alone gave him pause.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"Looks like your darling pet half-breed has finally moved on, cousin. Good for him!" He heard Bellatrix croon poisonously from the cell next to his, her voice echoed off the wet stone walls like a sharp clatter of cutlery. Her vicious laughter that followed rang painfully in his ears. It had been a while since she'd last sounded quite so lucid, and that was cause enough for concern. Her general wailing and screaming could be relied on like fine German clockwork, but was usually significantly less targeted.
"What are you talking about Bella, and how would you know anyways? Been taking secret trips to the mainland the rest of us have missed somehow?" He asked, breaking his own rule about not engaging with crazy. It never resulted in anything beneficial or helpful, or in anything other than a headache and heartache, really. That being said, after all these years imprisoned together she knew quite well how to draw him in.
"Start taking your shits in front of the guards like I do and mayhaps they'll start leaving newspapers behind for you too, Siri," she cackled horribly and he scrunched his face up in disgust. "Eurgh, you foul thing - did you really? You have a perfectly good bucket for that," he said reproachfully. Then the rest of her sentence caught up with him "Hang on, they've been giving you newspapers!? Real ones?" He demanded, as furious as he was curious despite himself. "Recent ones?" He added desperately, then winced and cursed himself.
She loved nothing more than using your own emotions against you.
"So serious, ickle Sirius. They should have called you Curious Black. What's it worth to you to find out?" She taunted, sounding playfully deranged, and he considered what he had that he was willing to give up. "What do you want? I don't have much more over here than you do, but you can have my next few meals if you want them. Merlin knows I don't," he offered casually, knowing she rarely touched the lumpy gray gruel they were given every third day, preferring to catch and eat whatever rats or crows she could find. Such a delicate creature. He shuddered.
"Nooooo, no no no no," she laughed and it sounded like a scream "you're not getting it from me that easily! What use have I for that rancid slop? No, it's getting colder every day and it's not even really winter yet - I want your robes. Mine are getting a little ragged and I'd like to use yours as a blanket. I'll be toasty through to spring," she said as blithely as if they were haggling over milk and eggs, and not the only stitch of clothing he had to his name and the thing that was actively keeping him alive here in this frigid hellscape. Their robes might be thin and ugly and made of the scratchiest wool the ministry could source, but they were imbued with just enough of a warming charm to allow them to feel every bit of the cold while keeping them from actually succumbing from it.
He scoffed in disbelief "Bella I'm just as cold as you are, and I'll genuinely fucking die of hypothermia if I give you my only set of robes," he ground out, less angry at her and more needing to make sure she understood what she was asking. She was truly mad, and as infuriating as it could be at times when her cruelty reared its ugly head, it was frustrating in an entirely different way when she couldn't intuitively grasp simple things like others having the same basic needs as her. Was she in a state of mind today where she realized that he could also perceive the sensation of heat and cold? Only the gods could say.
"That's awfully convenient for me then little cousin, because after you hear what I've just read I don't think you'll want to live much longer anyways," she said candidly, and he was taken back at how much it sounded like she might just really mean that. His heart raced in his chest, and he tried to push the emotion down so it wouldn't draw the dementors. Whatever information she had, she seemed convinced that it would make him suicidal. That could be good or it could be bad. Pain was a powerful motivator.
Either way, something devastating must have happened to the light side. Maybe Dumbledore or Moody had died, they'd both been awfully old even during the war. He struggled to breathe as he registered the terrible possibility that it might be something to do with Remus. He might actually want to throw himself into the rocky waters below his cell window if he heard something had happened to his mate. He had been locked away quick as blinking after that awful night, and he hadn't even had a chance to see the man before he'd been behind bars. He was fairly sure he was still alive, but what state he was in he had no way of knowing.
It was hard to keep track of time on a short scale, weeks and days slipped through his fingers like the seawater that so often flooded the floor of his cell. That being said, he was quite sure he'd been in this cell for roughly a decade now. That was ten years his lover had spent alone in a world that hated him.
The uncertainty ate at him - he had to know.
Feeling as though he were making a truly Faustian bargain, he shrugged out of his filthy gray prison robes and immediately started shivering, feeling the cold seep into his very bones without the buffer of the warming charm, however mild it was. He looked over to the wall he shared with his deranged and cruel cousin, and saw the top half of her face peeking up eagerly from the bottom of the barred window between them, delight dancing crazily in her glittering grey eyes. "If I give you these I want every single scrap of newspaper you've got, Bella. Old ones, new ones, interesting ones, boring ones. The one you think will make me want to off myself and all of the rest, are we clear?" He leveled with her, and she nodded excitedly "Yes yes yes, now give. Give!" She demanded.
He rolled his eyes and approached the little window that connected their cells. They were quite high off the ground and were really only meant for airflow, and he realized she must be standing on her bed. The damp stone walls practically radiated cold, and getting this close to them was almost physically painful. He tried to keep the shivering shudder at bay while he was making this little exchange with her, he didn't want her to think he was weak and take advantage. "Lift them up, I want to see them first," he said, and she complied, hefting up a thick pile of papers he couldn't believe she'd kept quiet about for as long as she did.
He nodded, and held up his robes so she could see them. She crowed in delight when her eyes landed on them "Yes! Give them to me now while they're still warm! Warm! Warm!" She pleaded, sounding madder than she had a moment ago, and he knew he had to get the papers from her fast before she forgot or changed her mind. "Bella, you need to give me the papers first, then I'll give you my robes. I swear it," he promised, and her mind was just far gone enough that suspicion was nowhere to be seen. She jammed them all through the window, and they fluttered to the ground where he stood. "That's everything?" He asked, and she nodded "all of them, every last scrap. Now GIVE!" She cried, and he reluctantly pushed the bundle of robes through to her grabbing hands. She tugged them the rest of the way into her cell and wrapped them around her like a cloak, then sighed deeply and contentedly and sank down out of his view.
Hoping there was actually something useful to be found and that he hadn't just signed his very life away for nothing, he started scanning the headlines. It wasn't hard too terribly hard to discern the greater passages of time on an island that had two distinct seasons - cold and colder. He knew the less cold time of year had recently ended, but that the harshest days of the colder time hadn't yet fully arrived. It could realistically be anywhere from late summer to early winter, but he'd been here long enough to make an educated guess that it was most likely some time in the late fall.
Trying to remember the names of the months shouldn't have been as hard as it was, but he felt like he remembered the ones he was thinking about having lots of Ms and Ns and Os. BERs. Embers. Sss… eptember? No, that was still sort of summer. Octember? That wasn't right. October! Merlin's starchy white y-fronts, but this place had destroyed his mind beyond recognition. Octember, what an embarrassment.
Looking at the pages, his vision swam frighteningly and he briefly worried that he'd traded for papers that weren't even in a language he could read. It was a terribly long time before for his eyes adjusted to the markings, and he recognized that they were in fact English. It had just been so long since he'd seen anything written down that he'd nearly forgotten what it looked like. He breathed a heavy shuddering sigh of relief when he was finally able to start making sense of what he was seeing.
The dates were the first things he checked. He'd been right about how long he'd been in here - if it was really 1991 then that meant it had been ten years. If it was really fall like he thought, then all of the papers she'd given him were from earlier in the year - there were a few political and financial pieces but they were mostly spring and summer society events. The Malfoy's June celebration for their precious little brat's eleventh birthday had been canceled, boo fucking hoo. Cry the little princeling a river, he was sure the lad had been given a stable full of abraxans to make up for the terrible inconvenience. Although, the thought of Lucius Malfoy suffering from something so mundane and common as bowtruckle fever did bring Sirius some measure of joy to imagine.
Apparently there had nearly been a run on the bank in late July and some conspiracy nutter was theorizing that another goblin rebellion was coming soon. Yeah, and it was bright during the day and got dark at night - what else was new?
August and September were abuzz with political speculation - what would be on the docket when the session finally started in October, what seats would be filled and which would remain empty at the Wizengamot opening quorum, boring snoozefest. Not what he was looking for.
An older one from more than a year before the rest of them announced his grandfather's death and ran his obituary… but then who was running the house now if old Arcturus had finally croaked? A new head of House had reportedly successfully challenged for the seat at the bank but no one knew who it was. No one from the family had come forward to make any official announcements or comments or done any of the things the rest of the peers usually expected from their fellow "great houses," and that in and of itself was suspicious. He thought he remembered something happening last year, the family magic doing something different for the first time in a long time. Maybe that's what that warm feeling had been, a new head of house. Maybe a kinder one, who'd bothered to spare him a thought while they were being elevated.
Where was it? Which one of these was supposed to be devastating enough to make him want to end things? Furious with her and starting to feel as if he'd definitely been swindled, he resigned himself to having to actually read them all to find out. As he skimmed through each article and editorial and they all one after another proved inconclusive, he felt his temper rise. She'd been yanking him around after all, and now he had no robes to survive the upcoming winter. He sighed and got to his feet "Bella," he said, raising his voice and feeling his scratchy throat protest "I think you may have accidentally forgotten to give me the important one, the one you said would break my heart?" He said wearily.
The ratty bird's nest on the top of her head that had once been a thick mane of sleek luscious curls popped back into view, her eyes impish and feigning poorly at innocence "Oh Siri, would you look at that, it's still right here on my side after all! But we already traded your robes for my papers. What's done is done!" She said with a pout and a shrug, as if it were out of her hands entirely. He gritted his teeth, this was about what he had been expecting. He tried to keep the anger and resentment out of his voice "No problem at all Bells, we all make mistakes. We'll do a new trade then, a fresh one. What do you want for your important paper - my pillow, my bedding? I haven't exactly got much left to give you, cousin," he said lightly, fists clenched at his sides and face a rictus of a horrible smile.
She cooed happily "Oh yes, yes! Your pillow! Extra robes and an extra pillow, I'll be sleeping like a queen! Give me your pillow Siri, and the paper is yours!" She gushed, bouncing and clapping her hands like a child. It turned his stomach, and he stalked over to his pathetic little cot and snatched it up, then strode back over and held it up for her to see "Please be sure this time Bella, that's the one you told me I'd be so upset over? And it's whole, no pieces are missing?" she nodded, her hand thrusting up with a single page of newsprint clutched in her fist "this is it, it's all there. Now give. Give!" She demanded, all subtlety and artifice gone.
It was by no means a fine thing, and it was especially not a clean thing, but as he passed his flattened little pillow through the bars she took it from him and held it as if it were made of spun gold. He wished he could have been so easily pleased and placated. He reached through the bars and grabbed her hand, taking the paper from it. She barely even noticed, and didn't make a single noise of protest.
Scurrying back over to the floor, he uncrumpled the paper and smoothed it flat, jaw dropping at the headline. He read it and his temper rose higher and higher.
WEASLEYS AND WEREWOLVES IN THE WIZENGAMOT - WHAT NEXT?
TUESDAY OCTOBER 1ST 1991
DAILY PROPHET SPECIAL EVENING EDITION
WIZENGAMOT OPENING SESSION REPORT
BY EDITOR IN CHIEF / POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT BARNABAS CUFFE
History was made today in wizarding Britain as the highest court in the country formally opened its 436th session. As members were called to roll and confirmed for their initial quorum by Chief Warlock and Hogwarts School Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, several long-empty seats were unexpectedly claimed.
The court has traditionally consisted of hereditary seats allocated to the lords or ladies of wizarding Britain's great houses, but when the ministry was formed in 1707 additional seats were added for the minister and their secretary as well as the departmental heads. In the last few decades there have often been rumblings of whether or not to add a handful of community elected seats to represent the common witch and wizard, but no official moves have ever been made to see this enacted.
Lasting from the 1st of October to the 31st of March, the Wizengamot session will see its members serving to make case rulings as well as craft and amend legislation twice weekly on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Excepting for closed cases and high security ministry matters, court is open to the public to attend and witness. As Chief Warlock Dumbledore has repeatedly stated, all British witches and wizards are encouraged to take part in our political process.
The minister has made several statements over the last few weeks suggesting that such topics may soon appear on the docket as school reform measures and the underage magic ban. You'll hear it here first if that is the case, readers!
As many will sadly recall, a great number of our great houses were brought to the very brink of extinction during the war, most notable of which were the Prewetts, the Bones, and of course the Potters. With Madam Amelia Bones and Mr Barty Crouch Sr both already serving as members of the court due to their role as Departmental Heads, many have wondered if they will finally call for proxies to vote in their place for their long empty house seats. While there is still ample time for either of them to do so in the future if they should so choose, the disappointment in the court today was palpable that the Bones and Crouch house seats sadly remained empty during the call for quorum.
In the case of the Prewett seat, Lady Muriel Prewett, 127 years old and currently bedbound, was believed to have been the current head of her family. Having publicly sworn she would never relinquish the family seat while she still had air in her lungs, many feared that it would remain empty for the foreseeable future. In a move that made waves, the seat was claimed at today's session by none other than William Weasley, eldest son of Molly Weasley née Prewett, Muriel's niece and great-nephew respectively. While the young man made no mention of how the seat was obtained from auntie dearest, tongues were wagging as the magic of the courtroom clearly recognized Mr Weasley as not merely the holder of the seat by proxy, but as Lord Prewett himself.
After being sworn into his seat, Lord Prewett called for a vote to appeal the longstanding removal of the Weasley house from the wizengamot. Formerly the lords of the small village and surrounding farmlands of rural Ottery-St-Catchpole, the Weasleys lost their seat during the height of the war with Grindelwald due to unsubstantiated rumors of mismanagement of funds and lands. Contentious even at that time, many pureblood families were outraged that a member of the sacred 28 houses would be removed from the Wizengamot for any reason.
Though today's vote was not remotely unanimous, it still passed 26-to-9 (of 36) in favor, with Lord Prewett recusing himself for propriety. After the vote the seat was formally restored to house Weasley, and Mr Arthur Weasley, youngest son of Lord Septimus Weasley, was sworn into the seat as his father's proxy. Though Lord Weasley is reportedly still sprightly and well in his old age, he sent the court a humorously curmudgeonly affidavitrenouncing any desire to be involved in politics. Mr Weasley was seen teary eyed and smiling, and was overheard remarking that he had never thought he'd see the day his house was elevated to its former glory.
Unbeknownst to most of British wizarding society, ministry archival records show that after the death of the late Lord Arcturus Black last year the seat and title went not to any adult member of the family, but to a child - current Hogwarts first year student Hermione Greyback. How this plucky young thing managed to tame the notoriously strong and fickle fey magic of house Black remains a mystery, but eye witnesses confirmed that she was wearing the family's Lordship signet ring today in court as she named her father, known werewolf Fenrir Greyback, the proxy for her seat.
Although chaos erupted and objections were made at her announcement, the entire court was stunned into silence as her father made a bold and shocking wizard's oath that will be printed below verbatim, though readers be warned it contains graphic language:
"You think I'm a monster? A villain? Fine! I will address the rumors about my reputation once and only this once before this court. Hear me witches and wizards of the wizengamot, and listen. Hear me Lady Hekate, goddess of magic and all things arcane, and judge me thusly - I, Fenrir Lokir Greyback, do so solemnly swear upon my magic that I am not and was never a servant of the Dark Lord known as V*t and that I have never acted on his or his death eaters' behalf. I swear that I have never intentionally killed another man. I swear that I have never consumed human flesh. I swear that I have never raped or molested anyone or ever desired to do so. I swear that I have never lost control of my wolf while transformed during a full moon. I swear that I have only ever once in my life bitten and infected a human against their will, and that I have since reconciled with this individual and done what I can to do right by them. I swear that I have done my best to be a good and peaceful man, a loving father to my children, and a fair and wise leader to my pack. If I have spoken a single word falsely may the Goddess Hekate herself strip me of my magic here and now before you all and render me a squib forevermore… Lumos! Are you satisfied, ladies and gentlemen of the court?"
After much deliberation, the impressive light show that came forth from Mr Greyback's wand when he invoked his magic to cast the lumos after making his oath was rendered by the court to be more than sufficient evidence of his innocence, though it was pointed out by the chief warlock multiple times that Mr Greyback himself was not on trial. After further heated deliberation and a vote of 21-to-15 (of 36) in favor of his ability to serve on the Wizengamot, he was sworn in as his daughter's proxy to the Black seat by a speechless court. This reporter was certain that Mr Greyback wasn't going to have the votes he needed, when to the shock of the entire court Lord Malfoy stood in support of the ayes, and several other traditionally conservative lords followed suit.
In a turn of events no one could have expected, Mr Greyback's adopted son was also in court today to name his own proxy for his birth family's seat - current Hogwarts first year student Harry Potter Greyback (yes that Harry Potter, the boy-who-lived). Many throughout the wizarding world have wondered what ever became of young Mr Potter Greyback after his incredible defeat of he-who-must-not-be-named as an infant. No comments were made by either father, daughter, or son as to his life or his whereabouts since that fateful night, although witnesses claim that the small family seemed close and affectionate.
Minutes after the business with his sister Lady Black, Mr Potter Greyback, seen wearing his family's Heir ring, named Remus Lupin, a close friend of his late birth parents James and Lilly Potter, as his seat proxy. Mr Lupin is a relative unknown, but was reportedly seen holding hands and sharing a passionate kiss with Mr Greyback as the family left court for the day. Could it be that the boy-who-lived and the young Lady Black are being raised by two adoptive fathers? Are Mr Lupin and the Greyback children also werewolves? This reporter has many questions after today's session, but only time will tell.
Full roll of the current session's quorum
Chief Warlock - A.P.W.B. Dumbledore
Minister for Magic - Cornelius Fudge
Senior Undersecretary to the Minister - Dolores Umbridge
Court Scribe / Records Liaison - Mafalda Hopkirk
Head of Magical Law Enforcement (DMLE) - Amelia Bones
Head of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes (DMAC) - Hamish Fairweather
Head of Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures (DRCMC) - Gethesmane Prickle
Head of International Magical Cooperation (DIMC) - Bartemius Crouch Sr.
Head of Magical Transportation (DMT) - Goforth Swiftly
Head of Magical Games and Sports (DMGS) - Ludovic Bagman
Head of Mysteries (DM) - Saul Croaker
House Abbott - Lady Hester Abbott
House Avery - Lord Dernbem Avery
House Black - Proxy - Mr Fenrir Greyback
House Bones-empty-
House Bulstrode - Lord Dilligence Bulstrode
House Burke - Proxy - Mr Caractacus Burke Jr.
House Carrow - Lord Amycus Carrow
House Crouch-empty-
House Fawley - Lady Jangerly Fawley
House Flint - Lord Quigly Flint
House Gaunt-empty-
House Greengrass - Lord Hyperion Greengrass
House Lestrange-empty-
House Longbottom - Proxy - Madam Augusta Longbottom
House Macmillan - Lord Earnest Macmillian Sr.
House Malfoy - Lord Lucius Malfoy
House Nott - Lord Thoros Nott
House Ollivander - Lord Geraint Ollivander
House Parkinson - Lord Preston Parkinson
House Potter - Proxy - Mr Remus Lupin
House Prewett - Lord William Weasley
House Rosier - Lord Evan Rosier Jr.
House Rowle - Proxy - Madam Eugenia Rowle
House Selwyn - Lady Selenium Selwyn
House Shacklebolt - Proxy - Senior Auror Kingsley Shacklebolt
House Shafiq - Lady Nigella Shafiq
House Smith - Lord Deuteronomy Smith
House Slughorn-empty-
House Travers - Lord Forsythe Travers
House Weasley - Proxy - Mr Arthur Weasley
House Yaxley - Proxy - Mr Corban Yaxley
The sentence fragment "seen holding hands and sharing a passionate kiss with Mr Greyback," repeated itself in his head over and over and over again until he was sick to his stomach from just the thought of it. His mate hadn't been lonely at all it seemed, he'd moved on and found himself another man. Just how long had he waited after Sirius was locked up in this hellhole to lift his tail for a bigger and badder canine?
He fully understood exactly why Bella thought he might kill himself after reading those words, but he was simply too furious to take that plunge down into the rocky waves below and let it be the end. He had to confront Remus first. He had to ask him face to face how he could have let another man come in and take his place - steal the life that should have been theirs to live together.
Contrary to what he had told his mad cousin, he could have given her a great deal of food. Somewhere in the back of his mind he must have been planning something like this for a while, and had started cutting down on his eating significantly. He'd begun saving the tiny rock hard bread rolls their gruel came with and grinding them down into a fine crumbly flour, which he mixed into the gruel to turn it into a thicker paste. He'd painted the paste onto the bricks on the dry side of his cell to form flat little loaves that he could save for later. He'd made several of these rations from each of his last five meals, and they were small but dense. He figured if he ate them sparingly he should have enough to last himself a week.
With no other place to hold them, he choked down a handful of them and shoved the rest into the ankles of his socks. He folded up the article and slid it into the waistband of his underpants, and then transformed into Padfoot. He had always been extremely careful not to let any of the human guards ever catch sight of him in his animagus form, but they rarely ever showed their faces other than to drench someone in ice water or beat someone half to death or deliver the prisoners food every few days. Their sheer laziness and fear of the dementors had been the thing that had allowed him to spend long stretches of his time behind bars as a dog, and was what had ultimately let him retain what little of his sanity he'd been able to hold on to so far.
Padfoot the dog didn't strictly like being cold or wet, but he could easily survive in conditions that would have long since killed Sirius the man. An open air cell was similar enough to a cave, and that's where he would have looked to find shelter in the wild. His body's thick fur immediately eased the worst of the biting chill, and he could at the very least stand in his cell without wasting a huge portion of his energy shivering and feeling truly miserable.
Padfoot didn't mind spending twenty hours a day or more sleeping. With only four walls and a low cot to bounce around off of, snoozing was practically his favorite thing to do. Padfoot heard the moans and wails of the other prisoners and the sporadic mad shrieking of his insane cousin but they didn't fill him with dread the way they would have done to Sirius the man, to his ears they were just the noises of other animals nearby. Padfoot may have missed meat, and raw or cooked made little difference to him, but he ultimately couldn't care less what his food tasted like. He had spent the last decade happily gobbling down every last bit of the grey slop the guards sporadically tossed into his cell, and done so with an enthusiasm that would have made Sirius the man retch and dry heave.
Padfoot the dog wasn't vain like Sirius the man was, but he was still aware that he was a shadow of his former self. Where he had once in the prime of his youth been strong and agile with thick shiny fur, he was now thin and weak and his fur hung off of him in mangy matted tangles. Even though his eyes couldn't discern quite as many colors as the man's could, he could still tell the difference between black and grey, and knew that his fur had started to fade prematurely with the time he'd spent in this place. It had aged him terribly, and although he was in better shape than the man that wasn't exactly saying much.
For the most part it was a tragedy how he had deteriorated. But the thinness… that terrible thinness that spoke of over a decade of malnutrition and starvation, it would be his ticket out of this awful place.
Even as supermodel heroin-chic rail skinny as he was, it wasn't easy to squeeze through the bars of his cell. He had felt one of his ribs on his right side not break but rather bend alarmingly and not exactly go back into place correctly once he'd made it through. That was something he'd have to worry about another day. He didn't have time for distractions as unimportant and irrelevant as his health.
Except for the prisoners in their cells, the halls of Azkaban were empty. It wasn't a feeding day, so the human guards were nowhere to be seen. He'd heard rumors over the years that they had an even smaller island off the actual prison island that they bunked on. He remembered from his auror days that the ones who served here had always talked big shit about being tough enough for Azkaban, but was it really that impressive if they lived and slept somewhere safe?
The dementors were out and on the prowl, and one floated mere inches past him without realizing he was there at all. He still felt the cold and the misery they spread, but it was like they simply couldn't sense him at all when he was shifted, and even if they were actively sucking in soul matter he was impervious to their draw in this form. Like trying to stick a straw in a carrot. As a human he'd have been on the ground half dead and on his way to being a vegetable if one were this close to him.
Staying in the shadows, it wasn't hard to quietly make his way through the fortress and out to the cliffs below. Other than the soul-destroying demons there were very little actual security measures in place. Every door he'd crossed had been unlocked. There hadn't even been any proximity alerts or caterwauling charms. No tricks or traps or caltrops. He'd made his way out of the most feared prison on the face of the planet and it had been a walk in the park. He couldn't bloody believe they'd never accounted for animagi, and he was suddenly glad that he wasn't actually evil.
Thinking about all of the other cunts in there who were actually evil, he grimaced at the thought of serving as a role model for them to emulate. He hadn't wanted to prove it could be done, he'd just wanted to be free to go yell at his boyfriend. It was a little late for rethinking his actions. He was outside and the spray of the ocean was too close and the scent of it too crisp for him to go back the way he came. The air away from the dementors was so much lighter and brighter and he could think clearly for the first time in-… in ten years.
A decade of his youth stolen away from him. Locked away without a trial or even a proper interrogation. Why had he gone after Peter instead of grieving with his mate like he should have? Those feelings were too big, he wasn't ready for them yet. He wasn't ready to process the complexity of regret and injustice and loss of self. But he could bring himself to yell at his boyfriend.
Anger was a lot easier. Simpler.
Bracing himself for what he knew must be unimaginably cold water, he jumped into the ocean and began doggy paddling for the shore. He prayed like hell he was swimming in the right direction, and that he would end up in the UK and not Norway or the Netherlands.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A week and a half later, Padfoot was in a back alley near Leicester square scrounging through rubbish bins for whatever leftovers and edible trash he could find. After his great plunge he'd come ashore near Inverness, and had broken into a rural wizarding home there to use their floo. He'd crossed nearly the entire country that way in fits and spurts, and had never made more than a few dozen miles jump at a time. He'd laid more than a few false trails, doubled back in several places, and eventually given up on magical travel altogether and ridden the rails most of the way into the city. It hadn't been too terribly difficult to blend in with the homeless, and almost everybody loved dogs.
Only a few blocks away from the Leaky, his ears perked when he heard the careless whispering of magicals out and about in muggle London. He hunkered down and crept up behind two blokes who were having a piss near the dumpster, both properly sloshed and tongues wagging "Still can't believe prissy little miss Black just gets to decide the laws don't apply to her and her uppity fucking family. Wee cunt's taking us back to the pre-war days when the pureblood families did whatever the bleedin 'ell they wanted and the rest of us jumped to wipe their arses for 'em," one of them snarled hatefully, and though Sirius would have on any other occasion agreed with him emphatically, something about the way they were talking about the girl he'd read about rubbed him the wrong way and set his fur on end.
"Oi, easy there mate. Might be a filthy rich lordling, but that's still a little girl you're talkin' abou' innit? Raised up in that nest of vipers, mebbe she ain't got no one to lead her straight and narrow. Who teaches you right from wrong when you've got more money than Slytherin's ghost?" The other said quite sympathetically, and his companion scoffed but didn't have much of a rebuttal. He cleared his throat and snorted a loogie onto the cobblestones, "Yeah, I s'pose it's easy to forget her and Potter are just firsties. Imagine our ickle Sally Anne on the bloomin' Wizengamot telling grown witches and wizards what to do!" He suddenly laughed "Do you fink when they're 'oldin court they still have to call the Chief Warlock 'headmaster'?"
Grateful that they were at least alert enough of their surroundings to have dressed in muggle clothing, he crept closer and closer behind the two of them as they made their way back into the pub they'd come out of. On silent paws, he came within a hair's breadth of the fellow on the left and snatched the newspaper out of his back pocket with his teeth, darting back into the shadows of the alley before the fellow had even started to turn around in alarm. He patted at his trousers wildly "Somefink just grabbed me bum!" he shouted, and his mate just laughed at him long and loud "You've had a few pints too many if you think you've been groped, you bloody woman," he said mirthfully.
Meanwhile Sirius had long since made his way to a better lit area where he could lay out his treasure and see what was going on in the wizarding world since his escape. Once again he found himself shocked at the headline, and uncertain if he'd read it correctly.
LADY BLACK COMMENTS ON CRIMINAL COUSIN
MONDAY OCTOBER 21ST 1991
DAILY PROPHET MORNING SPECIAL EDITION
ANNOUNCEMENTS SECTION
BY EDITOR IN CHIEF / POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT BARNABAS CUFFE
This reporter was lucky to catch his second glimpse of the mysterious young Lady Black today when she arrived in person to the prophet's offices to deliver a formal statement on the recent escape of her cousin, Azkaban inmate Sirius Black.
For readers who are unaware, Black managed to flee from the island prison sometime early last week. Guards have since admitted that they don't check on the prisoners daily, and that the last time they had seen him was when they delivered food to his cell block on Monday the 14th. When a guard returned on the morning of Thursday the 17th to serve the prisoners their next meal, Black was nowhere to be found. He could feasibly have made his escape at any time during the three day absence, and his fellow prisoners in the closest nearby cells claim they never saw or heard him breaking out. Dementor activity was uninterrupted, and there was no evidence to suggest that they had fed on Black to satiety.
By Friday, minister Cornelius Fudge had called an official manhunt for Black, and sent the aurors out in force to begin doing sweeping searches of all wizarding villages and towns. Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade were the first to be checked, and although there were no signs of Black having been in either place they will both maintain an auror presence until he is apprehended. The average witch and wizard can expect to be stopped and questioned if they have business there, and unless the business is particularly urgent the DMLE is currently recommending that people stay home and off the streets while the hunt continues.
In response to the minister's announcement, Lady Black has come forward to issue a prepared public statement. Her words as delivered to this reporter are as follows:
"Sirius is a complicated individual. After having consulted with family and close friends who knew him best, I am of the firm belief that could not have been in his right mind when he attacked and killed his childhood friend Peter Pettigrew and the unfortunate muggles that were caught in their crossfire. Additionally, our family solicitor has searched the ministry and wizengamot archives and found no evidence that a trial ever took place before he was incarcerated.
For these reasons, I am prepared to invoke my right as the Head of a Lordly House to grant one of our sons sanctuary. I urge the minister and the head of the DMLE to instruct their aurors to bring him in alive if he is found. He deserves to have his fair day in court at the very least. If we are wrong and he is in fact found guilty of the crimes that he has been accused of, I will be the first to agree to negotiate with the ministry for his return to Azkaban. But if he is truly innocent as one of his close friends still insists he must be, then I will personally stop at nothing to see his name cleared and his freedom restored to him. If Sirius is out there reading this, I swear on my magic that until a verdict is reached no member of our house will harm him, and that should he present himself at any Black family residence he shall be given shelter there."
The ministry has yet to respond, but one can only imagine that other lords of the wizengamot will want to set the precedent of respecting Lady Black's ancient rights, if only to ensure the future protection of their own. This is a case that will surely raise passions across the country, as Black was supposedly the one who betrayed the Potters' location to he-who-must-not-be-named. That being said, the only official charges on record against him are for the murders of Peter Pettigrew and the 13 muggles that died that night.
If her statement is correct and a trial did not ever actually take place, then the ministry may have no choice but to free Black even if they do successfully catch him. In fact, if he was incarcerated without being convicted, the ministry may owe Black an enormous sum in reparations for a decade of unlawful imprisonment. In the coming days, we can surely expect to hear responses from the minister himself as well as from Madam Amelia Bones, head of the DMLE.
Sirius stared slack jawed at the words before him, and his eyes kept coming back to the line "as one of his close friends insists he must be" and a spark of hope came to life in his chest. That had to be Remus, it simply had to be. If there was anyone alive on the face of the planet who believed he could be innocent it would be him. His mate knew he hadn't done it, could never have betrayed his friends, would rather have died first! But then, hang on…
If Remus knew he was innocent, why hadn't he tried to get him out sooner? Why had he left Sirius to rot in prison? Why had he moved on to another man? Why had he raised a child with someone else? None of it made sense, and none of it felt good to think about. He kept coming back to the crux of it all - if he had really known or even suspected he was innocent, then how could he have possibly lived with himself doing nothing all these years?
The urge to find his mate and scream at him until he fell down dead at his feet became steadily stronger as he reread the article again and again. His magic rose within him in a way it hadn't since well before he had spent a decade surrounded by dementors, having his energy and his life force constantly drained away. In a twist, he found himself wandlessly apparating across the city to the steps of the dingy little flat he and Remus had shared so long ago. The hallway looked substantially worse for wear than the last time he'd seen it, and the door hung wonky on its hinges.
Some of the best years of their lives had been spent together here. It had never exactly been a palace but now it might as well have been a dump. When he nudged the door it didn't take much to get it to swing wide open, and his heart sank as he saw inside the flat. He'd seen and slept in cleaner homeless encampments, and it was a shocking and jarring sight to witness such devastation in the indoors. Tramps must have come and gone and been squatting here for quite a long time, because the place was absolutely destroyed. There was an open fire pit in the middle of what had once been their dining room, charred carpet burned away around the edges. The walls were greasy and smoke stained, and there was trash everywhere he looked.
A few sleeping bags were scattered around the living room and a shopping trolley sat awkwardly in the hallway as if it knew it belonged outside. It was half full of blankets and pillows and clothing - someone's treasures that they'd surely come back for sooner or later. He didn't want to be here when they did. Grabbing one of the blankets to wrap around his shoulders, he went back outside and sat on the stoop, and tried and failed not to cry.
As he sat sobbing on the steps, the cold of the concrete biting into his bony arse, wearing some stranger's tatty blanket like a cape, eating a gruel loaf from out of his sock, he felt obscenely filthy and utterly disgusting. Like he wasn't out of place here with the rest of the rubbish and the refuse. He knew it was unlikely he would ever be beautiful again in this lifetime, but he wanted desperately more than anything else to be clean and warm again. To have hair that wasn't matted from the ends all the way to his scalp, and crawling with lice and fleas and gods knew what else. To have skin that wasn't greying and sucked in around his bones, dry and fragile to the touch like crepe paper. To have teeth that didn't feel like there was a thick fuzzy carpet growing on them. To have fingernails and toenails that weren't chipped and broken with dark circles of dirt underneath.
What had he been thinking, showing up here to yell at his lost love looking like this? He'd drop dead of sheer humiliation if Remus ever saw him looking like this. He didn't even want to see himself, he'd steadfastly avoided catching sight of his own reflection in windows and puddles. He knew he had to be frightening to behold. You couldn't just survive what he had, endure what he had, and come out the other side fresh as a daisy. He may still be alive, but living through it had taken a toll, and the exhaustion that suddenly overcame him was staggering.
This was the last place he'd seen Remus, and he knew the other man wouldn't be staying in Grimauld place or Godric's Hollow. One was a smoking crater and the other had too many terrible memories to even consider setting foot in. Neither were fit for habitation. He also knew the man was far too proud to couch surf with friends either, hating to be a burden or overstay his welcome. He didn't know where his mate could be, but he knew he needed to clean himself up before they came face to face. He simply couldn't take the shame of being seen like this by someone who had once loved him.
The beginning of a useful thought took hold of him, and he realized that Andromeda probably knew where Remus was. Last he remembered she had been a healer, and her oath should make her obligated to at least check him over and do no further harm. She had always been his favorite cousin, and he remembered her little Dora running around oinking at him with a pig nose and pink bubblegum hair. Maybe she would even be willing to help him like the girl in the paper had promised. If the prophet was to be believed she had sworn as much on her magic - and that wasn't anything to sneeze at.
Running the back of his hand across his cheeks and sniffing deeply, he stood and shifted into Padfoot. He didn't think he had enough juice left in him to do a second wandless apparition, the first one had danced the razor's edge of accidental magic and had still drained him of nearly everything he'd had. Resigning himself to a long and sorry slog on foot, he trotted his way down to the road and took off in the direction of the Tonks' house.
Hours later, a sleep-bleary Ted answered the door when he pressed his nose into the bell to ring it, and he briefly felt guilty for showing up so late at night and not at least waiting until the morning to bother them. The man's greying blonde head poked out and he looked left and right before his eyes lowered to rest on him where he sat on the welcome mat, tongue out like an innocent lovable stray. The man snorted and shook his head "She figured we'd be seeing you here sooner or later," he yawned, opening the door wide enough for Sirius to come slinking in.
The man's wand shot a miniature fireball into the fireplace "Sleep for now, it's the middle of the night. We can talk once the sun is up," he said pleasantly enough. There was a surprising lack of fear or alarm in his voice for having an escaped felon in his home. Sirius hesitantly crept over to the hearth and the waves of heat it emitted felt like a bump of cocaine rushing through his veins. He wanted to curl up and live inside this flame and the life it brought rushing back into his limbs. He was asleep the moment he closed his eyes.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
He came back to consciousness slowly, his mind rising through a heavy fog, to hushed nearby voices discussing him. His eyes still closed, he pricked his ears up to pay attention to what they were saying, but a little girl's voice quickly cut over the adult conversation "His heart rate has just sped up, he's awake now and probably listening… Hello Sirius," she said softly, and not unkindly. She came to crouch in front of him and he opened his eyes, and was thrown back into memories of Bella as a child. Tiny of body and enormous of hair, curls twisted themselves up into a frizzy dark halo around her head. Grey eyes like tombstones were set wide and large in her young face. Her features were nearly like looking in a mirror. Or a family photograph.
She smiled down at him and reached out to run a finger down his snout "I wish I could say it's nice to meet you, but I haven't yet. Although I am in general rather fond of fellow canines, so there's good odds that we'll get along just fine," she said with a bit of a giggle. She waited several long moments for a response, but he clammed up. Refused to bark or whine or whimper or make even a single solitary peep.
"Would it help you to come out of your fur if I greeted you in mine?" She asked gently, and he would have reared back in surprise if his body had the physical energy to do so, but all he could do was cower on the floor and try not to piss where he lay. "Oh cousin," she said, sounding absolutely heartbroken for him. If he were still his younger self and had any pride at all left in him he might have resented the idea of a child so openly pitying him, but those days and that man were long gone. Quite frankly it was about time - he deserved some pity, finally, for the horrors he'd endured to still be alive today.
As if she did it as easily as breathing, the girl whispered something about goddesses and her magic invoked and there was an enormous bloody wolf next to him on the rug in front of Andromeda's fireplace. For a moment she sat just as primly as the little girl had, and then she shook out her fur and slumped down onto her belly and lay her massive head over the back of his neck. Pressing him down into the safety of the space under her chin, her mouth opened and her tongue lolled out and licked at the top of his head. Curling up around him, her bulk cut him off from the rest of the room and the people in it, leaving him exposed only to the warmth of the fire.
For the first time in over a decade, held close under his little cousin's wolf form in front of a blazing fire, with a creature at his back that could give a dragon a run for its money, Sirius felt like he might just be safe here after all. Though he was still emaciated and weak, his muscles atrophied and his bones brittle, he finally managed to convince his body to actually relax and he fell back asleep much deeper than he had before.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The next time he woke up, he was in a bed. For a moment fear gripped him and he struggled to breathe at the thought that he might be back in Azkaban and that his entire escape had been a hallucination. Maybe the Black madness had finally come to him. But no, it had to have been real - even he couldn't have imagined such wild circumstances.
As he rolled over onto his back and starfished out his limbs he realized just how good a bed he was in. Azkaban had never provided even a fraction of this comfort. It had an actual mattress and an actual feather pillow and an actual duvet blanket. Not just a straw mat on a cot with a thin piece of wool to cover himself. He cringed at the thought of having dirtied his cousin's linens with his terrible filth, and then realized that his skin felt different to the touch.
Remarkably different.
The way his fingers moved against each other as he ran them across the soft silky sheet wasn't greasy or sticky or gritty. The ends of his nails no longer felt jagged and sharp. He rubbed his toes together and they were the same. Beginning to hyperventilate, his hands shook as he raised them to touch his hair. A sob choked out from between his lips as he ran his fingers through silky clean strands, with no tangles or mats to be found, and when he opened his mouth he froze. His tongue ran over smooth teeth, with no thick fuzzy plaque clinging to them.
Tears fell freely as his panic rose in waves in his chest. This was too much. Being clean had been what he had so desperately wanted, but to wake up and find it done for him? With no memory of the hot soapy water he had craved more than his own next breath for so long? Not knowing if he'd been spelled clean or washed? Wondering just who had seen him bare and the horror story such a sight told was a nightmare of an entirely different breed. He had lost so much, did he not deserve even the privacy of his own body? He wept and whimpered and cried, fists clenched in his own clean and good smelling hair.
That brought a fresh torrent of tears to his eyes and another layer of shame and panic. It wasn't just that his body was clean, it was that he smelled good. It had been over a decade since he had last smelled good. There had been rain water and sea water that had flooded his cell over the years that he'd managed to desperately scrub with on occasion, and buckets of cold water splashed over him every now and again by sadistic guards, but he hadn't truly washed and bathed himself since before he'd been imprisoned.
In Azkaban he hadn't been able to bring himself to care because he hadn't thought anyone would ever see or smell him again, and everyone else there stunk to high heaven just as badly as he did. Every other miserable sod had also spent years wallowing in their own filth, so there was little shame among inmates. Unwashed bodies, fetid breath from rotten teeth, buckets overflowing with shit and piss, the place had been rank and ripe and only the constant cold had made it bearable. If it had been even the slightest bit warm in the prison the stench would surely have blossomed into something absolutely unbearable.
He brought a shaking hand up to his head and pulled a long silky lock of hair under his nose, sniffing it deeply with shuddering inhalations. Wracking his brain for its scent-memory, he tried to remember what the herbs were. The blend was light and floral and a bit citrusy on the nose, like a fragrant cup of tea. So many of his memories of before were faded or tainted by the dementors terrible icy freeze, but he knew that when he used to wash himself he had liked to use a cleansing oil for his hair and body that smelled of peppermint and eucalyptus and rosemary and lemon. It had relaxed his muscles and invigorated his scalp. Remus had loved to stick his nose into the crook of his neck and just breathe the scent in.
He remembered in an instant that he was in his cousin Andy's house, and recognized that what he was smelling was her favorite blend - chamomile and lavender and bergamot. The tight knot that it felt like his chest had constricted into began to ease, and he felt the edges of panic that had been building recede. It had been years since he saw her last but Andromeda had loved him once, and having been invited in by her husband gave him a powerful advantage. As long as he was incapacitated in her home, at the very least she was required by not only her healer's oaths but by the ancient rules of hospitality to not harm him except in self defense. He may have vehemently hated pureblood tradition, it had been the cudgel his mother beat him with as a child after all, but it protected him now and for that he was reluctantly grateful.
He heard paper pages rustling and opened his eyes to see that said cousin was in a chintz armchair next to his bedside, reading a paperback book. It was a familiar chair, he'd sat in it many times before visiting her here in her secret muggle home as a rebellious teenage boy and a resentful young man. He'd sat in it for hours waiting as she'd given birth to her baby daughter, and he wondered what had become of his cousin. Gods but she'd be nearly an adult now, wouldn't she? The last he'd seen her it was impossible to tell what she actually looked like, as she loved to constantly transform her features like a little chameleon. She had never looked the same twice.
It was a comfort to him to realize that Andy, who was less than a meter away, must surely have heard his panicked cries but had chosen to let him be. Her eyes had stayed resolutely glued to the pages of her book. In another family she might have jumped to intervene, shushed him or wiped his tears or told him everything was fine. It most certainly was not, and he was glad she'd had the good sense Merlin gave a toad not to try and tell him otherwise. The Blacks were cold but they thrived on the truth, and a pretty lie would have only hurt more in the long run.
As he felt himself start to calm, something heavy pressed the mattress down next to him as if someone had sat their entire weight down right on the edge of it. He felt something wet probe softly at his elbow, and he looked down to see that the enormous wolf from the night before had rested her head on the bed and was lapping at him. Her head was as big as his entire torso. It was like a Clydesdale's, or maybe bigger, and while Padfoot the dog had been comforted by her bulk Sirius the man found himself balking at the sheer size of her. She froze mid-lick as they made eye contact, her tongue out and flat against the bare skin of his arm. Her eyes were bright and sparkled with enough intelligence for him to recognize a twinge of awkward embarrassment at being caught thusly. He couldn't help but chuckle weakly at the sight of it, and was temporarily disarmed. "Good morning to you too," he croaked as cheerfully as he was able.
Andromeda began to speak softly, and he flinched away from the noise at first before he realized her words were for the wolf and not him. It had been so long since he'd heard another human voice that wasn't screaming or moaning or wailing. He'd almost forgotten they could whisper and talk and sound tender. "Really darling, there's no need to be shy. Just think of him as a larger rowdier version of one of your many young cousins. He was quite a bit like Fred and George in his youth, picture the two of them with long dark hair and you're golden," Andy said kindly to the wolf, who whined in the back of her throat in a way so similar to a child being embarrassed by a parent that he wheezed with laughter.
It was utterly absurd that a creature of literally mythical proportions would need a pep talk to speak with him face to face. Him! A felon on death's door.
"I always thought the thing they said about spiders had to be rubbish," he said under his breath, knowing she'd be able to hear him. "That they're more afraid of you than you are of them? Well here I am nervous to talk to you and it looks like you're just as nervous to talk to me," He reached his hand out tentatively towards the wolf's nose and touched the pad of a single fingertip to it lightly. "Cold and wet, just as it should be. I'm no magizoologist but I'm prepared to diagnose you as a healthy puppy all the same," he said, and his cousin chuckled and the wolf whuffed. In a shimmer of green sparkles she was a girl, knelt by the side of his bed.
Dark curly hair, piercing grey eyes, that aristocratic nose and chin. Her features were so achingly familiar, she looked like all of his worst nightmares combined. The mother who never had an ounce of love in her heart and had nearly killed him more times than he could count. The father who was too busing drinking himself into an early grave to lift a finger to protect either of his sons. The uncles and aunts and grandparents that stood back and let it all happen. The cousin that was a sadistic psychopath in the service of an evil megalomaniac. The brother he had loved who hadn't been clever enough or brave enough to get out like he had, and who had thrown his precious life away. The other cousin who had escaped and never looked back, who he had been so fiercely proud of but that he'd missed terribly.
(The worst of it was that she looked so much like him. A little female clone of Sirius Black as a child. What his own daughter might have looked like if he'd had one. Him and Moony… it wasn't possible, but he'd longed for it once. More often than he'd be willing to admit.)
His nerves came back to him at the sight of her, and his skin itched to transform back into Padfoot. His jumbled mess of feelings was so big and overwhelming that he didn't want to have to face them as a man. Things were so much easier as a dog. As if she could sense his inner turmoil, her little hand reached out and gripped his tightly. "Stay with us, Sirius," the girl said softly, but with the firm weight of command in her voice. Something in her tone grounded him, and he effortlessly relaxed into submissive deference to her. It was as if there were a pair of teeth in the back of his neck and the full weight of a large body was pressing him down. He caught himself before he actually rolled over onto his back to expose his belly, but it was a near thing.
"You can go back to being the dog whenever you need to, but I don't think you really need to yet, do you?" She asked him, her eyes big and bright and observant. He felt exposed under her gaze, and he squirmed uncomfortably "No, no I s'pose not. I can be me for a little while longer," he said. She considered this, and her head tilted like an inquisitive puppy. "Are you not you when you're the dog?" She asked astutely, and a shudder ran over and through him. Aside from long late night talks with Moony, he'd never quite put it into words before, never discussed it with another person. "When I'm Padfoot, the part of me that's Sirius is in a place far away where he doesn't have to worry so much about the things that hurt or scare him," he said, much more honestly and earnestly than he meant to.
"I'm sorry to hear that," she said, with what seemed like real sympathy on her face. "My wolf is me and I'm her. Nothing changes except my physical form. But you and I aren't exactly the same, are we? I've heard about why you are what you are. I was impressed by it, the strength of your devotion and convictions," she said, and he felt a very animal surge of pride that he'd ever once managed to do something that pleased her, even if it was so long ago now. It was uncharacteristic of him, and it left him a bit apprehensive of the power her presence was having on him. She might be a giant beast but she was still a child wasn't she?
"What are you?" He blurted out thoughtlessly before he could stop himself, and immediately he felt incredibly foolish. If she hadn't had such a wry little amused look on her face he almost might have had the impulse to clap his hand over his mouth or grovel in apology. "Aside from the obvious, I mean," he clarified "you're clearly a wolf shifter of some kind. Not an animagus though, I suspect. That's no mundane wolf," he reasoned, and to his surprise she nodded in agreement. "Well, it both is and isn't mundane. It's certainly magical, you're right on the money there cousin. Wolves don't exactly get that big in the wild. But it's also mundane in that it very much is my natural form - I'm a werewolf," she said proudly, and he instantly scoffed dismissively and shook his head.
Despite all that she had done for him, he felt a rush of resentment that she would try and lie to him when he was so clearly at her mercy. "Pull the other one, princess. I've spent more full moons shifted together with a werewolf than you've been alive for," he hissed scathingly, hoping she would flinch or recant. To his disappointment she merely arched a single unimpressed brow at him, utterly unflinchingly. He thought he heard Andromeda hum disapprovingly at him from where she still sat reading at his bedside a few feet in the other direction. When he looked back up at the girl's face he was startled to see her grey eyes were glowing molten silver, they no longer looked anything like the family trait that had for so long haunted him in the mirror. As she opened her mouth to speak he could see her canines were twice the length they should be and a frisson of something unsettling swept over him.
"You knew a single werewolf in your youth, a loner who hated and feared himself and made no efforts to ever bond or reconcile with his wolf spirit. I am the daughter of the alpha of a pack of over a hundred wolves, a true wolf born blessed by the moon. I fixed the one you knew, freed him from the cycle of violence the man and his wolf were caught in. Now he can shift as easily as I can. The world isn't so simple as you imagine it to be, Sirius. You should know that better than anyone. After all, there's much more to your story than we currently know, isn't there?" She challenged, and it was as if she'd injected ice water into his veins.
"Fixed him? What did you do to my Moony?" He demanded, his anxiety bled into anger and his temper began to get the best of him like it always did. He tried to sit up but was so weak he struggled just to roll over onto his side. It took all he had to not collapse back down and simply lay there. She put one of her little hands on his shoulder so gently he'd have thought it wouldn't have kept a piece of parchment from blowing away in the wind, but the strength in her arm was enough to hold him in place like heavy iron manacles.
There was a frown on her face but her voice was still even and calm when she spoke again "That's part of what I came to discuss with you today. I was planning on offering you sanctuary at our pack compound. I think it'll be the best place for you to heal, and certainly the safest. You're family, Sirius, and I want what's best for you. For you to be healthy and happy and free if you're innocent, which I suspect you are. But my offer is conditional upon you not interfering in my father's relationship with Remus. I know you two were together at one point. Whether it was as best friends, boyfriends, mates, I don't know and I don't care, and it's not really any of my business strictly speaking. I'm too young to hear about it either way. But I know him and my dad are trying to make something work and I won't have you coming between them and ruining it. They like each other and they deserve to be happy, and I need to know if you're going to be able to respect that," she said with all the cool confidence of an experienced couples therapist. It was particularly jarring coming from the mouth of a precocious twelve year old girl.
As she delivered her ultimatum the fight left him. It was tough, but it was fair. Damn her, but it was fair even if it didn't feel like it. He let his limbs be heavy and he slumped back into the mattress, his eyes began to water as he stared at the spackle pattern on the ceiling "He was mine first. My lover, my mate. I don't understand how he could be with someone else while I'm still breathing, no matter how much he may hate me," he said, heartbroken as he lay there.
He heard her sigh, and felt her grip on his arm lighten to a softer touch "It's really not my place to say, but I don't think he hates you, Sirius. It's more complicated than that. I know he's missed you terribly," she said, and she sounded just confident enough that he desperately wanted to believe her.
"I'll promise you this - if he wants to talk to you I won't try and stop him. He's an adult, and he can make his own decisions. Maybe he's ready, maybe he's not. This last week has been hard on him, knowing you were alive out here on the run somewhere, and struggling between staying upset with you and being worried for you," she said with a crooked little grin, and he felt his heart swell as her words caught up to him. He had almost forgotten what his face felt like stretched into a smile "He's been worried about me?" He asked, as his thoughts raced towards a destination he hadn't dared to dream of. Images of the two of them reuniting and reconciling and maybe even patching things up danced through his head.
"Of course he's been worried about you Sirius, we all have been. The entire family," she said as if it were a given. As if having a family that cared about his wellbeing and continued existence was something normal he should expect. Her tone stayed light but her eyes narrowed suddenly "Speaking of the family… Sirius, there's someone you haven't asked about. Haven't even mentioned once. Why haven't you said his name?"
"Who?" He asked, and his anxiety rose sharply. Surely she didn't mean to make him talk about- …not when he was so weak and vulnerable still. He could scarcely imagine anything worse.
"Harry, Sirius. Why haven't you said a word about Harry yet? I thought for sure he'd be the first thing you'd want to talk about when you woke up," she said conversationally, but he still felt as if an arrow had buried itself in his chest all the same.
"Why would I? I don't want to think about Harry. I already know I failed him just as terribly as I failed Jamie and Lilly. I've spent enough time grieving and hating myself. I thought you said you wanted me to heal?" His voice bordered on hysteria, and his breaths came short and fast. He didn't notice how badly his hands were trembling until she reached out and stilled their shaking.
"Well… Of course I do, but aren't you the least bit curious? Don't you want to know what happened to him? Don't you want to see him?"
"This is cruel, I know I've made mistakes but even I don't deserve this, so just stop it! I don't know what you think this is going to achieve other than to make me feel worse. I'll see him when I see them, when I visit their graves at Godric's Hollow," He absently noticed that her brows were furrowed and that she seemed frozen in place, but how she felt was the furthest thing from his mind. He should never have come here, this was just another huge mistake in a string of awful regrets.
"…what?" She said, and there was such bewildered confusion in her voice that his panicked train of thought came to an abrupt halt.
"What do you mean, what?" He demanded, voice shaky but sharp. She may have offered to help him, but he didn't have to let himself be yanked around for someone else's amusement. At the end of the day he didn't know this little girl and he didn't owe her anything.
"Sirius… what do you think happened to Harry?" She asked gently, her voice impossibly soft as if he were a scared little animal she was trying not to frighten. Seeing red at the condescension, he lost his temper and snapped at the girl.
"What in Godric's good name do you mean what happened to him? I tried everything I could to save him but he was already too far gone. My godson died with his parents that night, and I might as well have killed him myself!" He told her, knowing exactly what she had wanted him to admit. The pain was intolerable as the memories he'd hidden in the furthest corners of his mind rushed back to him all at once.
He started to suspect something was wrong when the girl's little face fell dramatically and his cousin swore loudly from across the room.
(TWs: Sirius is severely depressed and him and Bellatrix both casually/conversationally mention suicide several times. Azkaban is its own warning. There is explicit mention of how his health and body have deteriorated from neglect/malnutrition, and it is described within the lens of highly negative self talk. There is a fairly detailed description of a place where homeless people have taken shelter and possibly judgmental view of it being unclean and unfit for habitation. There is a scene where Sirius wakes up clean after sleeping at Andromeda's house and briefly panics over the thought of someone washing/spelling him while he was unconscious. To be clear, nothing bad happens to him while he is asleep but he worries about it because he doesn't have a lot of control right now.)