Chapter Text
“...the ones who love us never really leave us, you can always find them in here…” - Sirius Black
"No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage done is by the victim to himself. One cannot even say that the ghost attacks the mind, because the mind, the conscious, thinking mind, is invulnerable; in all our conscious minds, as we sit here talking, there is not one iota of belief in ghosts. Not one of us, even after last night, can say the word ‘ghost’ without a little involuntary smile. No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense. Not one of us thinks rationally that what ran through the garden last night was a ghost, and what knocked on the door was a ghost, and yet there was certainly something going on in Hill House last night, and the mind’s instinctive refuge—self-doubt—is eliminated…" - the doctor, Haunting of Hill House
Chapter 1: Slumber
July 1996 // seventeen months remaining
The rain lashed around the house, slighted and angry, as if to cut through the black and grimy exterior and penetrate its vulnerable centre. The house in question was spindly and tall, squeezed between two placid Muggle townhouses sporting warm lighted windows and an array of mundane occupants, and though by all accounts it was the same size and shape as its neighbours, it nevertheless gave off the air of a sooty fireplace reaching toward the sky. As the rain howled savagely around the turrets, displacing dirt to stain the porous brick walls, the house steadied itself against the onslaught and prepared to fight back.
A passing Muggle might have noticed with trepidation that the dark rain cloud brimming uncomfortably low to the ground was nearly crackling with energy, as if lightning were gathering itself to leap to freedom. A more astute wizard would have seen the house wards sparking defensively, almost gleefully, as if energised by the challenge.
Inside the house, the windows rattled fiercely in appreciation, and fat dribbles of water attempted to burrow their way inside any cracks in the wall. The floor vibrated softly as thunder exploded outside, and the house elf in the kitchen looked up, shivered, and pulled his towel tighter around his thin frame. He had lived through many such storms, and he knew that the house was taking energy from the air, storing it deep inside, where the wizard magic lurked and something far more sinistre lay slumbering, to only occasionally rouse itself, like a dragon opening a gimlet eye.
In a large room near the staircase on the third floor from the top—or so a Hogwarts letter had said, twenty-seven years prior—a wizard slept. The large bed seemed to grow from the wall, an iron headboard of curled vines and burnished leaves crowning the wizard’s head. The wizard had matted black hair and a wide brow set with thick, bushy eyebrows. His eyes, even in sleep, seemed to be screwed up in deliberation, or perhaps agitation, and his pale mouth was pursed in distress.
The wizard, when he was awake, was named Sirius Black, and he had been sleeping for nearly a year. The expression of pained concentration that marred his once-handsome face far was not a result of disquiet, or at least, not out of any conscious worry. His face often made such expressions these days, and his magic often sparked anxiously around him, and his hands often clenched tightly under the clean white sheets, and his muscles often tensed for long periods of time before they reluctantly unwound themselves into a mistrustful relaxation.
Sirius’ unease, had he been awake to analyse it, was attributed to three main factors: the first, that he had been sleeping unceasingly for months already, and his body was growing tired with the effort of keeping him alive; the second, that his dreams were long and unpleasant, and they did not allow him to rest; and the third, that he was once again trapped in his childhood house, and his magic had already recognised the threat that the house posed to him.
But without a cure to the curse, Sirius Black slept without pause, without recourse, and without relief.
And so his story began to draw to a close.
***
He had been cursed by a relative, and the relative had died, killed by one not of their shared blood. (A redheaded boy with a shocked, bright stare, broken quills falling out of one hand). The curse did not know precisely what to do, and it hummed around his body in agitation, seeking vainly for an answer in the leashed power bridled by Bellatrix Lestrange's final actions. This Black heir was strong, stronger than most—perhaps not as strong as Bella, but few had been, and few would ever be again—and the floors of the house had become used to his steps, and the feel of his magic as it asserted itself against the enchantment in the walls.
Perhaps the correct course of action would have been to kill him, too, but the house had been deeded to Sirius, and Sirius had grown up in it, and his father had died in it, and his brother had briefly been its master. One Black woman had walked away from the family, and the other had not stepped foot inside the dark halls of Grimmauld for over two decades. Her magic pulsed softly from Wiltshire, contained within the Malfoy family wards, and the house was uneasy. Thus Sirius slept, unaware.
Alphard Black had been the last to attempt the heritage-stealing curse, and much would have been different had he defeated his eldest brother, Orion, for control of the Black estate and guardianship of its two young heirs. For a brief time before her death, Dorea Potter had contemplated the wisdom of attempting a similar gambit. That Bellatrix knew the spell sufficiently to cast it at a moment's notice did not necessarily indicate that she had been planning to challenge Sirius, and indeed, she had pointed her wand at her cousin intending to kill him there and then, on orders from her Lord and perhaps for her own selfish whims. But in this timeline, something altered, just slightly, perhaps a gust of wind that swirled around Sirius’ robes and highlighted their fine gold trim, or the sight of the werewolf reaching for Andy’s daughter, or the smell of elf-wine that still lingered on Sirius’ breath, so that Bella thought first of her greed—and her angry stubborn pride, and her sense of honour, and her scorned entitlement—and chose this spell out of the many in her arsenal.
Bella had, after all, spent much of her time in Azkaban dreaming fretfully of her inheritance, and Sirius had, after all, been in the middle of an early supper with Remus and therefore was wearing his fine dinner robes, which he donned for meals more to piss off his mother than anything, who was continually horrified to see Remus welcome in her home, let alone formally welcomed as a pureblood guest. (Remus was pureblood, for all his dirty creature blood, and he had been raised with a jumble of pureblood manners and werewolf guilt, by his sharply proper mother and his agonised, gentle father, so Sirius thought the nice robes were appropriate).
For an extended time, Bella and Sirius had been cellmates, and she had learned quickly that Sirius had never supported the Dark Lord and never intended to, despite the rumours. This had hurt more deeply than the residual welts on her wrists from the chains, though Bella would never admit to such a thing. Bella had been one of the few people to know that Regulus had turned, at the end of his life; indeed, she had been tortured as a way for the Black line to atone for their many sins, and more often than not during her fifteen years in Azkaban, Bella had imagined her baby cousin's tortured screams echoing in her small, dark cell. (Regulus had died alone, sinking quietly into the black murky waters in a far-away cave, but Bellatrix had always assumed the Dark Lord had killed him personally, as would befit the Black heir). To think that at least she would have Sirius in company, side-by-side in this nasty, dirty cell…then to lose him, the Black she had always thought herself most similar to, given Narcissa was more delicate than she ought, and Andy a traitor to her own kind…he had been a Gryffindor, yes, but he'd nearly killed Severus with the werewolf, and his command of Dark magic as a child had rivalled hers, and he had the Black rage that simmered relentlessly beneath her skin. He had been like her, or so she’d thought, and they’d spent thirteen years together, door to door, a distorted mirror of their youth, hearkening back to so many nights sleeping in rooms across the hall.
Bella had entertained her own rebellions as a child: she'd callously tossed aside Lucius, so that her sister would have to marry her castoffs; tortured the Nott girl, merely for her own amusement; excelled in her classes, though she ought to have been nothing more than an empty-headed society lady; and demanded of her mother that as the eldest Black child she be designated the heir-presumptive, rather than Sirius, who had only the dubious privilege of being born male. Bella had understood rebellions, and she'd always thought Sirius would come back to his family, once he was older.
And if he didn't, he had no right to enjoy the fruits of the many years of prosperous Black labour. He had no right to sit in Grimmauld and be surrounded by centuries of Black knowledge. He had no right to his Gringotts vault, no right to the gold and the jewels and the delicate robes of gently-spun Acromantula silk, no right to elf-wine and house-elf prepared food, not when he'd turned his back on his family and walked away, not when Bella had sacrificed everything—everything—to ensure the honourable continuation of her line.
(The house agreed—but the house also rejoiced in its griminess in a way that directly belied centuries of Black haughtiness. To have the children wake in the middle of the night and see a spider, spinning its thread silently above one of their heads, or to conceal a rotting mould beneath a fine gold mirror, or to allow a door to creak open and invite inside a ghoul…the house had its own delights, and its own resentments, and its own envies.
Though of course, the house was nothing without its heirs, and the house knew that too).
Sirius slept, unaware of the turmoil that pushed dirt through the cracks in the floorboards and coaxed a plaintive moan from the peeling black shutters outside. Kreacher noticed but did not understand, and his unease manifested as sharp pain behind his bulbous eyes, and the inability to sleep more than a few hours at a time, as if slumbering in conjunction with his master would cast them both indelibly into the curse's possessive grasp.
Whenever Sirius' magic flared and his brain stirred optimistically toward wakefulness, he saw again imprinted against his closed eyelids the final moments of his cousin's life. How she had twisted slightly away from his curses with nothing more than the sinuous grace of her movements—such a waste, he'd thought angrily, of her many years of private dance instruction—and cackled loudly over Tonks' desperate screams. How her fingers had pressed over the engravings on her wand, twin to his own, a private tapestry of ancient Black runes carved by the stooped old wizard that serviced the Black family for generations. Remus' voice echoed in Sirius' dampened mind, his agonised shout, his snarl of uncontrollable rage, and Harry's distant screaming, and the nearly soundless flash of green as Barty Crouch killed his only son.
Yet in many ways, the cursed sleep was a relief to his ravaged body. His magic ghosted over the open wounds that lingered on the verge of festering, and his skin knit itself together laboriously and carefully. By the end of the third week, the deadened nerves at the tips of his fingers—damaged by over two decades of Padfoot’s bare paws against the ground—sparked with new life, and the tension that perpetually lined his shoulders and lingered in the small of his back unwound, and his spine straightened, releasing the bubble of trapped air encased by thirteen years hunched over in a small cell. On some nights, the entire house seemed to let loose a hesitant exhale, as its heir relaxed into his healed body and his magic sang comfortingly around his limbs.
Perhaps it would have been better for Sirius to pass the rest of his life asleep. Sirius may have spent most of his life acting in accordance to others’ whims, but to end his life in the same way he lived it—an accidental conquest, an unknowing player in a game far too large for him to see, trapped in Grimmauld Place—was, in many ways, a tragedy, and a shade too predictable for comfort.
If Albus Dumbledore had not hesitated before telling his trusted spy of the Horcruxes; if Bellatrix Lestrange had not noticed the fine cut of Sirius' robes and felt a sudden surge of resentment; if Narcissa Malfoy had not been called to meet her sister on the same day that her son was nearly killed by the Boy Who Lived; and if Kreacher had died along with Regulus Black for their perfidy to the Dark Lord, perhaps Sirius would have survived.
If. Two letters to change the world, and two letters to keep it as is, as the old Head of Ravenclaw House used to intone in the face of student questions too laborious or lengthy to dive into at present.
Yet all of the above did come to pass, and a few other events besides, so that Sirius would spend the last night of his life in his brother's room, battling the locket that killed them both.
***
August 1996 // sixteen months remaining
Sirius dreamt.
Those who sat nervously by his bedside all felt the same creeping fear that perhaps the type of dreams that crept their way slowly into his head in the full heat of the afternoon, dust notes swirling ominously in the filtered desolate sun, were not quite normal dreams. For one, they lasted hours; entire afternoons passed with the Black heir stretched motionless on his bed, nothing moving save a family of moths in the upper left corner, and the curl of the curtains by the window, and the agitated twitching of his eyes. For another, he never woke from them, but dove smoothly into the next, small droplets of magic pooling agitatedly above his face each time he briefly had an opportunity to wake. Sometimes his magic sparked anxiously above his head as small coloured gusts that swirled above his body and smelled vaguely of sulphur.
There were dreams that left him feeling warm and sticky and redolent; Sirius sweated through these dreams, his body taut and frightened, seeking desperately the cool relief of a sharp breeze, or a whispered spell. Still other dreams were cold, colder than anything he had felt even in the midst of a Scottish winter, and his breath misted above his half-parted lips, and his brow began to contract and shiver. Others were so still, so quiet, that his heart would leap in alarm to ensure he was still alive, and the house would tremble, as if holding its breath.
And, though Sirius himself would not realise this for many months, there were dreams that were not his own.
First born, first failed, the house had whispered to him as a child, and again now, as he slept fitfully, his muscles tensed and his limbs tangled in the silk sheets. An heir and a spare, for an heir that is unworthy.
Grimmauld Place was nine stories high, a number its architect claimed was magically powerful, though in actuality three magical floors per one physical floor was the best the wizard could do at the time. Though most scions of the Black family took Arithmancy and would have known better, many of them snobbishly repeated to their friends—witches and wizards with seven floors, most commonly, or thirteen—that nine was more powerful than typically known, for reasons they could not reveal due to family loyalty. To be a Black was to always feel the sharp prick of anxiety that their legacy was too tenuous to rely on, that each generation could be the last, despite their status and heritage. Their mingled insecurity and entitlement was not unique to their family, but it was particularly pronounced, and particularly pernicious.
There was a thin, windy staircase forming the disjointed spine of the house, and each floor was designed to be more or less the same: a small landing, a single room on the right, and a narrow hallway to the left which led to a series of tilted rooms. On some floors, there was slight deviation: a sprawling library claimed most of the fifth floor, while the seventh sported an old potions lab, last used by Castor and Pollux Black for their experiments.
(There was a basement too, but even the formally designated heirs never ventured down past the landing with the troll leg and the glossy floors. They had heard the stories and they did not wish to determine the truth from the myths).
The effect of these floors stacked precariously on each other was a constant sense of movement, like the nauseating sway of a boat moored in the middle of a flat, empty sea. The thick glazed windows stubbornly refused to allow more than a damp, muted glow to graze the carpeted floor, regardless of the weather outside, and the ceaseless activity of the portraits and the creatures that lived in the walls created a gentle susurration, like long grass waving in the plains, or the bristling of trees in a forest.
The very top floor, by tradition, was designated for the head of the house, configured more like a confined penthouse than a series of rooms. Sirius had only entered three times: once as a child, once at sixteen, and once after his parents died. None of these three interactions left him with the sense that he wanted to claim the rooms as his own, and judging from the eerily precise way they were still laid out—his mother's inlaid brush on the large oak cabinet and his father's robes hanging in a line—Regulus had felt the same way.
There were other houses, too: a summer manor, and a cottage in France, and even a flat in Hogsmeade that was ceremoniously bequeathed to Regulus after Sirius had left, not that Sirius had known, the one time he'd shown up at his brother's place after graduation and shouted for him to come to his senses. And though Grimmauld Place was ostensibly built only a few generations ago, the history of the house was far older, and far more sinister, and the magic that lurked underneath the rotten floorboards had followed the Black family for a very long time.
***
December 1996 // twelve months remaining
Sirius dreamt, and Bella died, and both Andromeda and Narcissa grieved in their own ways, and downstairs Kreacher clattered in the kitchen, making more noise than his mistress ever would have allowed him, in the vain hope that perhaps Master Sirius would wake and shout at him for his interruption. As the days passed, Kreacher eventually mustered enough courage to clean inside Sirius' room, and after a time he even gave Sirius baths, touching his pale, limp limbs cautiously as he had not since Sirius was a child, and smoothing his wrinkled palm over Sirius' clenched hands.
Sirius dreamt, and Harry visited him over the Christmas holidays, the outcome of an extended fight between him and Molly Weasley, so that Christmas morning saw Harry and Remus sitting soberly by Sirius' side. The small tree that Remus conjured seemed to wilt more with each passing second, and both Harry and Remus felt curiously absolved of remorse when Remus vanished it upon their departure.
Sirius dreamt, and Tonks practised her wandless magic and read aloud from the Auror handbook by his side, and Andromeda forced nutrient potions down Sirius’ throat with an efficient series of spells, and upstairs Percy Weasley paced back and forth in Regulus' room, battling an impossible task, his mind too full of ghosts for him to add yet another to the list.
Sirius dreamt, and he saw many things that were not from his own memories, and he moaned and cried out in distress, his fingers curled angrily, his wand safely out of reach, and his cousin’s laughter high and shrill in his ears, and he heard his cousin sobbing, and beneath it all was a low-throated chuckle, and the hairs on the back of his neck rose and his muscles tensed for hours.
***
Sirius dreamt, and Mundungus Fletcher lingered soundlessly in the house after an Order meeting and swept a whole pile of glittering junk into a canvas bag, his heart beating nervously as he kept an eye out for that damned house elf. And it was odd that Kreacher was not behind him, long ears cocked, attuned to the silent disturbance of a thief in their midst, but Sirius had cried out, an unfamiliar seizure capturing his muscles, and Kreacher was by his master’s side nervously. The house too was distracted, or perhaps curious, or perhaps eager for the taint to leave them be, and so a door in a hallway swung open, and an idea floated through Mundungus’ mind. Mundungus normally would not have dared to go to such a high floor for his search, but something in the back of his mind prompted him, reminded him that Molly Weasley had forbidden her children from entering the room unaided, and he found himself stepping through the doorway before he had realised he had moved.
(Mundungus supposed later, his cheek smarting and his wares stolen, that he ought to have known better than to tangle with cursed Black goods, and perhaps he had known and ignored the soft bells of warning that chimed in his head. Yet as soon as he stole away from the house, Sirius relaxed, and Andromeda and Tonks conferred quietly with Remus and decided cautiously that the danger, insofar as there could be danger in an enchanted sleep, had passed).
It was not difficult to sell the goods that Mundungus stole. As long as there had been wealthy lords and glittering gold and silver trinkets, there had been places to sell them surreptitiously, and Mundungus knew all the right people. The brass dining set that Mundungus had wrestled from a locked cabinet on the first floor fetched a good price, and the teardrop earrings he’d found in a crusty kitchen cabinet turned out to be real diamonds, and of course he had a steady supply of silver spoons, stolen one-by-one after supper. Mundungus did not feel any sort of guilt about using Sirius’ things to fund his illicit lifestyle; Sirius hated the bloody house, he’d always said so, and Mundungus had been taking things for the last year without anyone noticing. Mundungus reckoned he was rather doing Sirius a favour.
The locket, though—this one he kept for himself. He wouldn’t have been able to say why, had he been pressed. It was clearly old and a tad tarnished, and the large S on the front (Selwyn, perhaps?) was a bit showy. But Mundungus had lived the life of a thief for many years, and he’d never been able to keep any of the treasures for himself. He was perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy (particularly as he did not trust the bloody goblins to hide his money and so kept his fortune scattered in hiding places all around the country) and always had to work to feed himself. He’d taken every disgusting, embarrassing job there was, and even being in the Order was a lark, what with Alastor ordering him around. They wanted him to do their dirty work and they judged him for his methods. It wasn’t fair, and Mundungus was so tired of the world being unfair to him.
So Mundungus kept the locket, and it whispered to him, and then one day, it left him cold. Perhaps the soul of Tom Riddle trapped inside was not happy at its ignominious heir. Perhaps it could only muster enough strength to glitter enticingly under Mundungus' shirt, waiting for an astute passerby to recognise its value. Perhaps it acted more intentionally. Umbridge in many ways was not much better of a carrier, but perhaps the locket sensed her maliciousness or reached out desperately at any opportunity to leave its squalour behind, and one day she paused in a routine search through Diagon Alley, and something caught her eye.
Percy Weasley would never know that he searched for the locket only three days too late, that had he gone to the caves earlier, he would have found the damned thing sitting demurely inside a cabinet and saved them all a lot of trouble. Of all the forces acting on their lives during the war, the frivolousness that drove the locket to leave the house, only to return a year later clutched triumphantly in Sirius Black’s sweaty hands, was undoubtedly one of the most tragic.
Yet the locket did leave, and Sirius began to grow stronger even as his body appeared to deteriorate, and Andromeda Black poured over the books in the upstairs library, searching for the right counter-curse to Bella’s last gift to Sirius. To end an inheritance curse was not easy, but Andromeda was a fearsome witch, and she had grown outside of the heavy influence of the Black family, and she loved Sirius, even years later, just as she loved Bella and Cissy and Reg, despite it all. Perhaps this love was why the younger generation of Blacks were able to battle their family curse, though it consumed nearly all of their lives in the process. They had been raised together, and grown together, and they trusted each other in a way previous Blacks hadn’t, and they had cowered from their parents together, and they had dreamed fitfully of a different world, one where they could stride through life unchallenged, taking what they were owed, without the heavy oppression they faced in so many ways. They loved each other and they hated each other too, and in death their faces looked the same, cool and imperious, matching stern eyebrows and thick eyelashes, pale, lovely lips and high cheekbones. They were all so young, even Bella, when they died, barely three decades to any of their names, and they were all still children in their own ways, still stuck indelibly in the past, unable to grow beyond who they used to be.
It had begun so many years ago with Cissy and Bella and Andy whispering together in the dark, and Sirius regarding Regulus with dark, upset eyes. Come with me, Sirius had said to Regulus, and when he had said no, Sirius had gone instead to Andromeda, who had tutored him on the proper way to ask Dorea Potter for refuge in her house. Bella had looked after Regulus in Sirius’ stead, guiding him through the dizzying intricacies of Slytherin politics, and ensured he had a safe, comfortable position brewing potions for the Dark Lord with that slimy Severus Snape, where Regulus would be safely out of harm’s way. Narcissa ran away to Wiltshire to marry her older sister’s ex-boyfriend on their mother’s command and lived with the guilt of it for many years, only for it all to bubble up in a dirty room in Hogsmeade, facing the shockingly familiar defiant glint in her other sister’s eyes.
Harry had thought, the first time that he’d met Andromeda Black, that she looked like Bellatrix Lestrange, and certainly they shared the same features, flashing eyes and strong features and thin, pursed lips. He thought it again when he watched her slit her palms with a cursed knife, dripping blood over her cousin’s face as she chanted the claim speech and willed her cousin back to life.
There was a moment when the curse murmured to itself uncertainly. Andromeda felt a strange singing in her breast as the magic took note of her power. Here was a Black heir removed from the family by one who had already died. Her blood dripped wetly onto Sirius’ face, and the house took note of its smell while it conferred with the curse, which hummed fitfully around their bodies. Harry was silent, his hands clenched, and the small of his back scratching with his partial claim to the Black line.
I relinquish my claim to this life, Andromeda thought to herself fiercely, driven by a strange, solemn instinct and the evaluative nip of magic at the base of her neck. I do not wish to be an heir to this house.
Slighted, the curse withdrew, and Andromeda locked eyes with Harry from across the room, and together they forced Sirius to wake.
After nine months, Sirius blinked open weary blue eyes and immediately recoiled. Bright lights, shockingly so, and the strange smell of a nearby candle, and the silk sheets around his damp limbs, and a persistent ringing in his ears, and the odd taste of blood upon his lips.
A victory, yet an uneasy one, and in the kitchen below Kreacher cowered into himself, twisting his towel between his fingers as the curse winged vengefully out of the open back door.
***
April 1997 // eight months remaining
After so many months of dark, heavy sleep, one might think that to be awake would be to be light and freed and unfettered. Yet Sirius, for many days after his abrupt waking, found it difficult to shake the impression he was still asleep, lost in one of those long, languorous dreams he still remembered in sharp, painful impressions. That faint gnawing hunger, for instance—it was somehow far more persistent than his thirteen years hovering at the edge of starvation in Azkaban, and nothing that Kreacher cooked up in the kitchen could stave it off. Or the voices that he felt stirring the clouds at the back of his mind, despite his attempts at Occlumency.
(Cissy and Andy had always been the best at Occlumency; Sirius, Bella, and Regulus had never quite mastered the requisite control, the specific type of self-awareness needed to build and maintain mental shields. Sirius never gained the ability to walk through his mind, but he had been able, he could have perhaps seen Hogwarts, too—but an older Hogwarts, a derelict Hogwarts, one whose shadows warred with the soft golden light of remembered youth, one where great gaping holes in the wards around certain areas betrayed him despite his efforts. Or perhaps he wouldn't have conjured Hogwarts at all, though in all truth he would be hard pressed to imagine another place to build to guard his innermost thoughts).
"Remember that you are awake," Remus said to him, more than once. Remus placed a great value in remembering, as if Sirius could look in the mirror and tell himself he was awake and be able to believe it was true. People can believe they are awake in dreams, as Sirius knew all too well, and pinching the soft underside of his wrist did nothing save make himself wince. Remus seemed to believe that to think of oneself as alive despite the evidence otherwise was the most productive use of one’s time, but Sirius could not say he agreed.
Yet Sirius obeyed, if only because he had nothing else to do. For several weeks after his miraculous return to the living, he told himself purposefully and firmly that he was alive, he was awake, he was aware. He told himself this every time he heard the echo of a whisper in the back of his mind, or the walls seemed to be pressing in on him as he stood in the centre of the room. He began to take very cold and quick showers, though in school he had been well renowned among the boys’ dormitories for the length of his showers, not to mention the warbling vibrato that would accompany the steam. (His mother had signed both him and Regulus up for voice lessons at a young age, perhaps lamenting her lack of daughters, and the talent had come far more easily to Sirius than to Regulus, who never could quite get used to the sound of his own voice). The shock of the cold water raining down on his head, even in his childhood bathroom, was the best approximation that Sirius could manage, the best explanation for what it had felt like to blink open his eyes and feel all at once how heavy the last few months had been, and how swiftly they had passed, and how old he suddenly felt, in a body that did not feel like his own.
What he did not say to Remus, nor to Tonks, nor even to Andy, who resolutely visited him each week with a stubborn expression reminiscent of Cissy, is that he had seen Andy’s face hovering over his and thought first with a dawning sense of relief that he had died. Only after he had experienced this feeling bursting in his breast came the weighty thud of understanding that he was still alive, and dreadfully thirsty, and that he had not moved for a very long time. (Alive, awake, aware. He was, he was, he was.)
(Well, he supposed that perhaps Remus could guess at the particulars of his feelings. Remus had always been like that, his amber eyes more kindly and knowing than they ever had any right to be, even at eleven. Sirius had been quite mean to Remus for the first few months of their shared acquaintance, inquiring in his best snooty pureblood voice as to the state of Remus’ tattered robes and uneven hair and strange scars on the back of his knobbly hands, each sharp rebuke an attempt at protection against the force of the soft understanding that Remus managed to exude even at his most timid. In the weeks that followed Sirius’ awakening, Remus seemed to discern that Sirius could not trust himself to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, and he managed to invent all manner of excuses for why he too might be awake at three in the morning, when Sirius had always known his friend to sleep on average for ten hours a night. Something about the wolf, if Sirius had to guess, though Remus was always fiercely defensive about any difference in his needs on account of his monthly problem.)
But eventually, Remus could not spend every second of his day in Grimmauld; for one, he insisted on maintaining a job, though both James and Sirius had offered more than once to employ or otherwise fund Remus, if only so that he could stop debasing himself by sorting Potions ingredients in Knockturn Alley or driving Muggle cars around London. For another, his monthly problem had become larger during Sirius’ slumber, or so Remus told Sirius on one of their last nights together, and he had been asked by Albus to sniff out the source of the rumours that the largest werewolf gathering of their time had been scheduled for year end.
(Silence, when Remus left, and Tonks was tied up at work, and Harry was still at Hogwarts, and Sirius began to hear the loud ticking of the grandfather clock on the wall echo in his ears, and the soft scraping of Kreacher’s mop over the dirty kitchen floor, and the rustlings of his mother talking to one of the other portraits. Silence, but there was something underneath the silence, a slithering, perhaps, or a hiss in his ear, or the quiet drip-drip-drip of a faucet overhead, though he checked each bathroom defiantly, wand out, and found them all to be empty. He had never heard silence that was quite so loud, even before the curse).
Andy’s presence in Grimmauld Place had come initially as a bit more of a surprise, particularly when she revealed proudly—the twist of her eyebrows more Bella than Narcissa, he supposed—to Sirius one night that she had been somehow inducted into the Order and reinstated onto the Black tapestry.
“My congratulations, I suppose,” Sirius replied to the news, a bit bemused at the sharp flash in her eyes. “You’re more than welcome to the dubious honour of being once more a Black. Are you going to challenge me over the house, then?”
When Andy drew herself up like that, bristling, she looked the most like Regulus out of any of them. Sirius allowed the memory of his brother to pass through his mind with practised detachment and waited for her response. “If I wanted the house, cousin, I would have taken it from you while you slept, rather than risk my life to awaken you.”
Sirius shrugged one shoulder, a gesture that had always made his mother hex him if she spotted it. “I’ll trade you for yours, if you key me into the wards.”
After another second, Andy huffed out a laugh and relaxed into herself. Sirius watched her curiously as she flicked her wand at her cup of tea, causing it to boil again. He’d forgotten that particular small rebellion, despite both of their mothers’ insistence that tea must be served at the precisely palatable temperature. He wondered if she reheated her tea in her home with Ted, or whether she only felt the urge in Grimmauld. Narcissa’s attempt at a rebellion had always been to claim the most delicate cup when their mothers would force on Bella the sturdier, uglier option. Even as a child, they had all known better than to trust Bella with beauty.
He couldn't say he blamed Andy, if it was the house that caused her to fall back into her childhood patterns. Grimmauld had much the same effect on him. The long, narrow staircases were precisely as claustrophobic as he’d remembered from the hours he’d spent hovering between severed elf heads and disapproving portraits, straining to listen for a hint of voices from the array of curious company his parents had entertained in the downstairs parlour, primarily wizards with hard faces and sneering mouths. The bathrooms were as awful, perennially damp and cramped as ever, despite Kreacher’s pretence of cleaning them, nothing like the spacious and sunny dorm bathrooms in Gryffindor tower. The only rooms that Sirius could even tolerate were the kitchen and the adjoining parlour, though he had to banish Kreacher with a lengthy and complex task to the other side of the house whenever he felt the urge to be alone. He couldn't hear Kreacher's pathetic, warbling voice without thinking of Regulus, who had always been more fond of Kreacher than their parents would have liked.
“I thought Nymphadora might be back on the tapestry,” Andy admitted, setting the cup back onto its saucer without a sound, a familiar gesture which suggested to Sirius that perhaps the reheating of the tea had been equally instinctive. "She's not, but I think I know how to add her."
Nymphadora Tonks was a woman that James would have adored, a thought that never failed to put a rueful smile on Sirius’ face, the same sort of expression he often saw on Remus’ face when he spoke of Harry. Sirius quite enjoyed having her around the house, not least because each time she came, she cheerfully and obligingly helped him destroy some disgusting Black artefact. They had begun cleaning out the upper Black library on Remus’ suggestion; Molly had initiated the process with the large army of Weasley children the previous year, but she’d seemingly lost the desire halfway through, not that Sirius could blame her. Sirius preferred Tonks to this task to Remus, who tended to want to catalogue the items. Sirius would tell Remus that he had enough personal experience with most of the artefacts to complete a senior project on any of them—at least those that had been in vogue while Uncle Pollux and Uncle Castor had been alive—but Remus was liable to adopt that pained, angry expression that tended also to accompany Sirius’ blithe references to Azkaban or his miserable childhood, and Sirius had endured quite enough of that look for a lifetime.
(Scuttling, overhead; skittering, chittering, creatures with minuscule scales and hairy feelers, the type that used to live in Uncle Pollux’s pockets or Uncle Castor’s bag, during a time in Sirius’ life when for months Sirius had been too afraid to sleep, thinking that he might wake and there would be a beetle in his ear or a spider crawling out of his mouth).
It was not that he was as traumatised as Remus would like to think. For the first two years after Sirius had starved himself—slowly and deliberately, as to ensure his skinny dog body could fit between the iron bars, after he had hidden himself away from the lurking Dementors and memorised the layout of the cells so that he could stagger through them with the thin light of the full moon leaking through the cracks in the grey, mouldy stone, after he had swum, half-delirious, across the frigid and choppy water, only to collapse midway through, with only a dizzying half-memory of the slices of the waves as they lashed his body with a sharp, freezing spray—for those first two years, Sirius had woken with nightmares more often than not, both when he was alone in the caves near Hogsmeade and when Remus had moved into Grimmauld with him after the tumultuous events of the Triwizard Tournament. Those were the years when even the sight of the sun filtering through leaves could bring Sirius to tears, and being proximate to Hogwarts had singed inside Sirius’ breast with a terrible, burning pain. He could admit now, with the wisdom of these past few years, that he had been something approaching traumatised then, and Remus had undoubtedly noticed.
And yes, he could understand in retrospect why Remus so often looked like he wanted to kill something. Sirius would quite like to kill something too, starting with his dear cousin Bella, and perhaps ending with those awful Muggles that had dared to mistreat James’ son, and certainly including the bloody rat. But Sirius had healed, and he no longer was liable to collapse at the shocking beauty of the oak tree outside, nor the sound of rain lashing the walls outside, nor the damp smell of Grimmauld Place rot that lingered in his nostrils when he awoke (as if a steam had crept insidiously into his nostrils as he slept) so he reckoned that Remus had no right to look at him as if he may still break at any moment.
“Perhaps she can, after the war,” Sirius offered to Andromeda, realising belatedly that he had not spoken for quite a few minutes. Andy smiled blandly at him and sipped again from her tea, pointedly, until Sirius lifted his own cup to his mouth. The tea was cold; with an ironic quirk of his lips, Sirius snapped his fingers theatrically over his mother’s best china until the liquid began to steam anew. Sirius could quite understand Andy's sentiment, after those thirteen awful years. He never wanted to have anything cold ever again, not even the soft ice cream that had been his and Regulus’ tradition after shopping for their books, nor the cool foam of a tall glass of Butterbeer in the Three Broomsticks. Everything in Azkaban had been too cold, so cold that it nipped at his ears and sent pained shivers down his fingers, that his toes had clenched together for warmth, and his bones had ached inside his shallow shell of a body. He froze himself each morning in the shower, as penance, or punishment, and then spent the rest of his day seeking warmth.
“Perhaps,” said Andromeda, watching with a shade of her mother’s attentiveness until Sirius had set the cup back into the saucer. She directed the teapot to fill his cup again, which he rolled his eyes at but did not openly protest. Sirius did not fully understand how Andy had found her way into his life again—he had seen her just twice in the past few years, only long enough to realise that she had a daughter and a Muggleborn husband and therefore could not be endangered by associating with him—but he could not say he was not pleased by her company. With Regulus dead, and Narcissa married to a Death Eater, and Bellatrix killed by Remus—which reminded Sirius that he ought to see how Remus was doing, all things considered, as Remus had never dealt with death as easily as the rest of them—Sirius did not have many relatives left that he would consider appropriate company, though the portrait of his mother downstairs would disagree. “Did you know that my daughter has been seeing Remus Lupin?”
Sirius instinctively bared his teeth without realising he had made the gesture. At Andy’s raised eyebrow, he coloured slightly, pulling his lips forcibly back over his teeth. He would have thought perhaps he’d spent the past few months asleep as Padfoot, given how Padfoot’s reactions seem to be so much more prevalent than his own, these days, but Remus and Andy had both assured him that he had been human each time they’d checked. “I guessed something of the sort.”
Sirius was not, quite frankly, sure what it is about the relationship that managed to sprout between Tonks and Remus during his coma that bothered him. He could understand how it would have occurred; by the sounds of it, neither had left his side particularly often, though Tonks had also managed to become a fully fledged Auror, or something close to it, which had made Sirius and his two years of Auror Academy quite proud. He would trust Remus with his life, so he couldn't say that he couldn't trust Remus with Tonks.
Yet something about the idea of them together sat uncomfortably in Sirius’ stomach. Perhaps it was that Tonks seemed so young to him. She was just barely ten years younger than him, or so he calculated, and he supposed that a ten year gap was perfectly acceptable. His own parents had been seven years apart in age, though their marriage was hardly one to hold up to the light as a fine specimen of love, considering their union had wreaked far more unhappiness on the world than the opposite. But Tonks was full of light and laughter in a way that Sirius and Remus were not, and Sirius couldn't understand how Remus had managed to overcome his characteristic self-loathing long enough to consent to be in a relationship with his young, bright cousin.
“I’ve asked him not to propose,” Andy continued. “Until the war is over, one way or another.”
The war was another thing that Sirius had missed out on over the last year, trapped into a sticky, drowsy sleep. Andy told him most of it, and Tonks a bit more, and Remus the rest, though each seemed to be concealing something from him in their own ways. During the months that Sirius had been asleep, Remus had killed Bellatrix, though he’d admitted softly to Sirius that he didn’t quite recollect the exact moment that it had happened. In the heat of battle, occasionally the wolf became dominant, which was precisely why even in the last war, Remus had never volunteered for duelling, and why Sirius had found it so shamefully easy to believe his second oldest friend had joined the Death Eaters. Harry, apparently, had resisted Voldemort’s possession, something that Sirius could not quite wrap his head around, and the Ministry had been forced to admit that the Dark Lord had truly returned to England.
Though, by the sounds of it, the Ministry was not being particularly active. Tonks always maintained that Scrimgeour and Moody had more of a plan than they seemed to let on, but Remus was always quite loudly disparaging of the Ministry. Sirius was so bloody tired of people having plans that they did not let on about, at least to him. Did it matter if the Minister were collaborating with the Head of the Aurors, he raged to Remus, who listened quietly, or if Albus were amassing strength quietly in the Order, if people were still dying in droves each day?
At least the school year was nearly over; Harry wrote to Sirius every week, and underneath the messy scrawl—Ron, dating Lavender Brown, much to Hermione's disapproval, and the unpleasant spectre of Snivellus haunting Remus' old classroom, and Slughorn's interminable dinners, and Dumbledore's Army, reunited for another year—there was a slight waver, a sense that Harry was perfectly aware of what he would face once the summer began and Hogwarts closed. Sirius couldn't say he blames him. There was something that Harry wasn't telling him, nor Remus, nor Andy, nor Tonks, and Sirius was patient enough to know he ought to wait until Harry joined him again at Grimmauld to pry. But that something, a sense of longing in Harry's words, as if he were already aware of how fleeting his time at Hogwarts had been, as if he knew how tenuous his grasp on childhood was—Sirius recognised it, and it chilled him deep inside.
At sixteen, Sirius had felt the same fear, the same hesitation, the same angry resentment that the adult world was soon to grasp him with its scaly claws and never let go. At sixteen, his parents had decided to formally name him their heir, a year later than they ought, which had been embarrassing and yet filled Sirius with an air of shocked relief to realise that no contract lay in front of him on his fifteenth birthday. At sixteen, they had begun to make stipulations on him, and he'd realised that they'd let him run wild at Hogwarts precisely because they knew they would be able to control him, when the time came, that they had methods of ensuring his compliance.
And at sixteen, Sirius had lit the contract on fire when it lay placidly next to his toast and pumpkin juice, and left all his things to rot in Grimmauld, and abandoned Regulus to his fate instead, and fled to James, who had always joked that his parents had wanted a second son.
Sirius did not have the steady warmth of Charlus Potter, nor the clever wit of Dorea, and Grimmauld was a far cry from Potter Manor, but Sirius would give Harry the refuge he deserved, and he would levy the entire force of the Black family fortune to protect his godson from harm. He would, he vowed to himself, and he squeezed his cup of tea so tightly that the delicate china broke, and the scalding water washed over his legs. Alive, awake, aware, he told himself as Andy jumped to her feet to help him, and he looked down at the blood that welled from the cuts on his hand with something like satisfaction.