Work Text:
The piano had not forgotten him.
It sat where it always had, half-drowned in shadow, its surface veiled in dust, its keys yellowed with time. The house had swallowed most things, swallowed voices, swallowed years, swallowed people whole, but not this. The piano had survived. It had waited. And now, standing before it, Sirius was not sure whether he had come to play or to bury it.
His fingers skimmed the wood, slow, uncertain. It was colder than he remembered. Or maybe he was colder now.
He had loved the piano once. Before he understood what love meant in this house. Before he learned that it was something given conditionally, something that could be withdrawn.
He had been small when he first sat at these keys, his feet unable to reach the pedals, his hands too soft, too clumsy. His mother had sat beside him, her touch light on his wrist, guiding his fingers, teaching them how to shape sound.
"Again," she had said, when his notes wavered. And so he played again. Again and again until the hesitation bled out of him, until his hands obeyed without thought.
When he played well, she would hum along. Sometimes she would close her eyes, and in those moments, he had thought she was happy. Thought that maybe, just maybe, if he played well enough, if he was perfect enough, she might always look at him like that.
But perfection was fragile. And Sirius Black was born to break things.
Regulus had been the one to listen without expectation.
His little brother had been small enough to sit on the bench beside him, legs curled up, chin resting on his shoulder, watching his hands move. "Play the stars," Regulus had whispered once, when they were too young to know the weight of the sky pressing down on them. "Play the way they burn."
And Sirius had laughed, struck a chord sharp and bright, let the notes ripple out like light on water. He had played constellations, spirals of melody curling through the air, played the slow birth of galaxies, the quiet death of suns. Regulus had closed his eyes and listened, and for once, the house around them had felt far away.
But time played its own cruel music.
One day, Regulus had sat beside him and hummed a different tune. The melody of their mother’s lessons. Smooth. Practiced. The kind of song that earned a smile.
Sirius had slammed the lid shut.
Regulus hadn't flinched. Neither of them did anymore. "You used to love playing," he had murmured, confused, hurt.
But Sirius had already stood. Already turned away. "Not anymore," he had said, because love meant something different now. It meant chains. It meant becoming something he refused to be.
He had never played for their mother again.
Years later, in another life, in another world, the piano had become something else.
The Shrieking Shack had groaned under the weight of their laughter, half-swallowed by dust and moonlight, and Sirius had played then, fingers dancing over the broken keys of a half-rotted upright piano, its sound sharp and uneven. He had played fast, reckless, music meant to chase shadows from corners.
"Didn’t know you were a bloody concert pianist," James had teased, sprawled across the torn-up couch, throwing a wadded piece of parchment at Sirius’s head.
Sirius had grinned, had slammed the keys hard enough to make Peter wince. "Oh, I contain multitudes, Prongs."
Remus had shaken his head, but his lips had twitched into something like a smile. "You play like you live," he had said, voice low, unreadable. "Loud. Unruly. No sense of self-preservation."
And maybe it had been true.
Sirius had never played careful music after leaving home. He had played to be heard. Played to shake the dust from his bones. Played to set fire to the silence, to burn through the dark.
Played to drown out the war already brewing in the distance.
Now, in the house of his childhood, the war was over, but the silence remained.
Sirius sat. The bench groaned beneath his weight, the candlelight flickering against the blackened walls. His hands hovered over the keys. The house watched. The ghosts waited.
He pressed down. The first note rang out, thin and clear. Then another. And another.
The melody unfurled slow, aching, something soft, something wounded. It did not rush. It did not rage. It did not scream.
It had been so long since he had played without anger.
He played the years he had lost, the years he had spent behind bars that did not have keys, the years he had wasted running from shadows that had always known where to find him.
He played the stars, the way they had seemed closer when he was young. He played their burning, their inevitable collapse, their light stretching across time, long after they had died.
He played the silence between notes. The things he had never said. The things he had never been able to.
And when the final chord faded, the house did not swallow it.
It let it stay.