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It had taken him a very long time to find out, because the only thing he could remember was Lily once saying that her sister and brother in law lived in ‘the dreariest, dullest new build in the blandest corner of Surrey.’
This did not particularly narrow it down, and it quickly became apparent to him that even the muggles were searching for him, so covering ground as a huge dog didn’t make it much easier. He thought perhaps he should just head straight to the school - he had seen the year on the front of the newspaper Fudge had given him, and worked out the maths, and realised that he would probably be in his third or second year now. He wasn’t sure. He still felt a bit muddled. Either way, he would be at Hogwarts, and he could await him there, but while he had an entire summer to wait he thought he may as well try to catch a glimpse of his godson first. Perhaps even approach him. As a dog, of course. Part of him was worried that it had been so long that he wouldn’t recognise Harry at all, that he might see many dark-haired boys at Hogwarts and feel utterly clueless about who it could be. If he could find him first, and know it was him…
He’d skulked around Woking, desperately trying to remember his muggle studies lessons (that he had taken purely to spite his mother and then discovered he’d actually quite enjoyed them), but in the twelve years he’d spent locked away it felt as though the entire world had changed. The muggles looked different; their hair wasn’t as big, the cars looked different, some of them were carrying little boxes in their hands and talking into them, it was all very bizarre. He got odd looks during the day - stray dogs weren’t common anymore, it seemed, especially not ones like him - so he mostly kept to the dusky summer evenings and nights, trotting around rather helplessly, wondering how on earth to find him.
When the idea came to him, in a tangled rush of realisaton and a memory of an old class, it felt so obvious that he was furious with himself for not thinking of it earlier. He watched as a group of teenage boys loitered around a red telephone box, sniggering over the little business cards advertising adult services in there, while one of them held the receiver between his ear and his shoulder, slotting little silver coins into the box. He wondered if one of them was Harry - they looked a little too young, but James had been short until he was about fourteen… The one punching the numbers in had dark hair, maybe that was him?
‘Mum, can you come and pick us up?’ he asked, and Sirius lowered his head, which, along with his ears, had pricked up in hope. ‘Nah, the film was rubbish… No! … ‘Cos the bus takes ages, that’s why!’
In the end, he put the phone furiously down and turned to his friends. ‘She reckons she can’t pick us up ‘cos she’s been drinking and we’ll have to get the bus instead.’
‘I’ll call my mum,’ said the shortest of the boys. Now that Sirius looked without hoping too much, yes, they were definitely too young. About ten. This boy in particular couldn’t possibly be Harry - he was so short that he cast around for a moment, then dragged a thick, heavy white book in front of the receiver, and then another heavy yellow one on top of that to stand on, ignoring his friends bursting into hoots of laughter and jeers.
Sirius, watching from behind the large commercial bins at the side of the cinema, stared intently at the book. They had spent entire lesson on phones… he remembered quite clearly.
He was unable to hold back the impatient little whine as he waited for the boys to leave the phone box, feeling an odd sense of urgency that hadn’t been there before. Eventually, a car pulled up, and the boys bundled in, leaving the phone box empty.
Sirius darted over to it, but as he scratched his paws against it, he realised he couldn’t open the door as a dog. But there, teasingly, just on the other side of the glass, lay the White Pages, just beneath the Yellow Pages. He skulked around the box a few times, his head low, his eyes darting around to look for muggles. But the film was still showing, and though occasionally cars and buses rolled past the street was quite empty…
He did it quickly, barely pausing as he turned back into a man to wrench open the door, clumsily seize the book, and run back to the bins. He wouldn’t manage as a dog, so he rolled them closer to one another, hiding him completely from street view, and in the strangely draining orange light from the street lamps, he began to rifle through the directories.
He spend the first twenty minutes going down the very long list of ‘Evans’, confused and disappointed that he didn’t find a single ‘Petunia Evans’ or even a ‘P. Evans’, until he remembered that Lily’s sister had married, and, just as Lily had done, probably taken her husbands name.
He sat there, feeling hopeless again, staring at the stained metal bins with his back against a spray painted wall, desperately trying to remember if James or Lily had ever told him the surname of the in-laws. His brain thudded as he strained to think of it, but it was no use. The only thing he could remember, and he wasn’t even sure if it was entirely right, was James, bashing away sarcastically on his piano, singing a spontaneous limerick - ‘there once was a man named Vernon, who really hated the Germans. He was uncommonly rude, and ruined the mood, but we don’t have to see him again, thank Merlin!’
So… he thought slowly, if he could go through the book of phone numbers, and find a Vernon, and a Petunia of the same name (because they weren’t common names, really, were they? There couldn’t be many), then hopefully they wouldn’t be unlisted, and he would have an address!
It took him several days, for there were many thousands of numbers and the pages were too thin for him to turn as a dog, so he was forced to find secret places to look through it. It was so boring, too, the names and numbers swam and swirled in front of his eyes, drifting about every time he stopped focusing. But finally, a few nights later as he lounged in someone’s greenhouse in the middle of some allotments, he reached the listings beginning with ‘D’, and saw it.
Dursley, P.
Dursley, V.
Beside both names was a phone number, and then, on the next column to that, Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.
It ran through him like an electrical storm - his fingers trembled as he traced over it. It had to be. It had to.
Where the fuck was Little Whinging?
One stolen Ordance Survey Map from a garage later, Sirius was panting as he ran, over two days, along main roads and down little lanes, scampering away when it looked like some well meaning do-gooders were trying to rescue him and take him to some animal sanctuary no doubt, racing through Surrey to get to the sprawling housing estates that made up the town of Little Whinging.
Where he promptly got lost. Everything looked the same, like a gemini charm that had gone out of control, and some roads seemed to be crescents while others were dead ends, he thought he passed the same corner shop several times until he realised that apart from houses corner shops seemed to be the only things around. It was just house after house, all with shiny cars on the driveways and neatly kept lawns.
Lily had been right, he thought as he padded down Wood Close, it really was very dull. Finally, in the early evening, his eyes fell upon the sign for Privet Drive.
It wasn’t a very long street, but he wasn’t sure which house it was that they might live in - the directory had not given an exact address. He tried to sniff at the doorsteps, he had always been able to identify where his friends had been when he was a dog, but of course he had never met the Dursley family, and had not seen his godson in a very long time, so it was quite hopeless. He thought if he paced up and down enough he might eventually see them through a window, but of course that risked people reporting a stray dog, too. There seemed to be a lot of cats about and he thought that might make people nervous.
It was pure coincidence, entirely, that his curiosity was piqued by the sound of angry shouts and screams, coming from down the other end of the road. Keeping to the shadows, out of the way of the pools of light from the street lamps, he trotted along, his ears pricked.
And then suddenly there he was.
He didn’t know what he had been worried about - he recognised him immediately. There was no mistaking him.
He was James in every respect, so much so that Sirius stood, quite heartbroken and a little afraid hidden in the bushes. His messy, black hair stood up at the back just as James’s had, he wore glasses (though when he looked closer they were rounder than James’s had been), and they shared the same face, the same jaw - it was eerie, like seeing a ghost in colour.
But someone was shouting out of the door at him, and Harry was shouting back that he’d had enough, dragging his trunk behind him, an empty owl cage under one arm. His face was set in pounding rage as he marched quickly through the dark, quiet street, the door slamming behind him.
Sirius followed, at a distance, hardly daring to believe it. His godson seemed to be running away, and a tiny, selfish part of him was glad - this might make it easier, once Peter was dead and Sirius’s innocence proved, for him to fulfil his promise to James that he would look after Harry.
He could hear Harry’s shallow breaths, the steady scraping of the trunk against the pavement and the occasional stumbles as it caught on kerbs or the side of lamp posts, and the thumping of his own dog-heart. He could still hardly believe it, how much he looked like him. They had said it plenty when he was a baby, and James had always been smug about it, and Sirius found himself internally saying, ‘look! Look at him! Look at him James. Look at him.’
After several streets, Harry seemed to be struggling to drag the trunk, and eventually he collapsed onto a low brick wall, panting heavily. He sat very still, and Sirius, aware that without the noise of the trunk Harry might realise he was there, crept silently away to lurk in a nearby alley. Now, he could see, was not the right time to approach him, no matter how much he wanted to bound up to him.
He looked furious about something, and slightly panicked too, and though it wasn’t a particularly cold night, he shivered. Sirius remembered when he had run away, that strange mixture of fear and satisfaction, even excitement, and watched closely. Harry was looking down at his wand, clearly thinking.
He wondered why he had run away - certainly James had found his in-laws unbearable and Lily had diplomatically called her brother-in-law ‘a lot to deal with’ but they had never suggested anything malicious about them, just obnoxious. In all honesty, Sirius had been a little concerned that, having been raised by people James had described as ‘ridiculous arseholes’ and ‘caricatures of muggles’, Harry might not have the sort of personality James and Lily would have raised him to have.
But then again, he thought proudly, as he watched Harry drag the trunk close and start to rifle through it, declaring that you’d had enough and you were leaving at the age of thirteen seemed like something James would have heartily approved of. Perhaps… not as himself, but perhaps as Padfoot…
He took a step closer.
Harry immediately straightened up from his trunk, looking around suspiciously. Sirius paused. Harry returned to his trunk, rifling through it noisily.
If Harry had had to run away because his aunt and uncle had been particularly nasty to him, Sirius would certainly do something about it. He remembered, quite clearly, Mrs Potter vowing to hide him in the attic rather than return him to his mother, and he rather thought that she would have done the same thing for her grandson.
But suppose this was just standard teenage angst? He was about the right age for it, he was sure every kid in his year at some point or another had had a dramatic argument with their parents and declared they were moving out. Suppose he did actually love his aunt and uncle as parents, and would want nothing to do with Sirius, who hadn’t been there at all for so many years?
He took one more step, and Harry straightened up once more, much quicker now, his movements alert and focused as he spun and stared straight at where Sirius was standing, gripping his wand. He knew that in the shadows of the alley there was no way that Harry could see him, so he used the moment to stare, once again, at the boy’s face, taking in every detail.
He had always remembered that he had eyes like Lily, but it was quite something now to see them squinting in the darkness, James’s straight eyebrows furrowed. He even had James’s cheeks - though they weren’t there now, Sirius knew that when Harry smiled James’s broad smile, dimples would appear. A slight breeze ruffled that familiar hair, and under the orange glow of the lamp light, Sirius briefly saw a thing, jagged red scar on his forehead. So that cut had been permanent. He had hoped, when he had seen it in the wreckage of the house he had loved and been happy in, that the Healers would patch it up with no problems, no memorial to that terrible night.
‘Lumos,’ he heard Harry say, and good god, he even sounded the same, somehow.
The end of his wand lit, and Harry held it over his head so that it briefly blinded Sirius, but when he adjusted, he saw Harry’s terrified, pale face, Lily’s green eyes widening as he stumbled backwards and fell over his trunk, hard, into the gutter.
Sirius was about to run forward and act the part of the friendly stray, but within a second there was an almighty BANG. The Knight Bus had appeared, and that meant there were far too many wizards about.
Sirius ran out of sight, ducking down and lying as flat as he could in some muggle’s hydrangeas. He could see Harry staggering up, still looking curiously around, before speaking to the conductor.
He had not been able to approach him, but Sirius was still full of joy as he watched his godson board the Knight Bus and shoot off to who knows where. Firstly, because he clearly had more sense than he’d had when he ran away, but secondly, and most importantly, because he was everything he had hoped he would be. James’s son, through and through, in appearence and boldness, unafraid to step out into the night and leave the safety of his guardians.
Now, he knew, he must begin his long journey north to find Peter, and bring him to the savage, brutal justice he deserved. He realised, with renewed fury, that if Peter was in Hogwarts castle, that he might have seen Harry there too. He would have recognised him, and stayed, cowardly hidden as a rat, apparently content to live beside the boy who’s family he had destroyed.
Because of course he must have recognised him. It would be impossible not to.