Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Sirius
Godric’s Hollow, 16:52, 29 August 1981
The cottage of Godric’s Hollow was currently doing a very convincing impression of a place where everything was just fine, which was a remarkable feat given that the Universe had just pulled the concrete out from under it and replaced the floor with a particularly deep and unforgiving abyss.
Sirius Black stood on the doorstep, feeling much like a man who had been invited to a party only to realise, upon arrival, that he was not a guest but entertainment, and the entertainment was a public execution. He pushed the door open, not wanting to remain outside what, under the Fidelius, passed for a flat piece of land while in fact being a building that had temporarily opted out of existing in the minds of almost everyone who might reasonably be expected to notice it, and all those who aren’t.
The Fidelius Charm, which was supposed to make the house invisible to anyone who wasn’t in the know, gave a sort of metaphorical ‘what can you do?’ shrug as he entered. This specific spell was designed for a happy family of three, and it found the current mathematics of ‘one-and-a-half plus a very large hole where a James used to be’ to be frankly beneath its dignity.
Lily Evans Potter sat in the kitchen, and as Sirius entered, she jumped up from her chair, scaring baby Harry in the process. He was currently seated in her arms, crying without restraint as he felt the abyss below him and the aching Fidelius above.
“Lily,” Sirius’s voice sounded brittle, like a biscuit that had been left in the sun for three weeks. “James—I’m so sorry. James is dead.”
The news of James’s death hit the room with the same grace and subtlety as a grand piano falling from a very high floor into a very small tea party. It echoed the sort of definitive, thudding silence that suggested the Universe had checked its ledgers, realised it was over-budget on ‘hope’, and decided to make some aggressive cuts. It could not have known that in 63 days, should this balancing act not have happened, ‘hope’ would have skyrocketed to levels only seen outside of war, which would be appropriate, as the war would be over. Instead, the Universe had balanced its ledgers too early, and for that, Wizarding Britain would now pay an astronomical price.
You see, one very specific life, that of James Potter—scheduled to end on a particular October evening, cross-referenced against prophecy, warnings, and a general sense of doom—had now been misfiled. Because of this, Lily Potter would live, although not because the Universe was merciful, nor because of any cunning plan, nor because it even particularly noticed. The Universe, having filed its early correction and feeling very pleased with itself, simply did not pause to consider the consequences. It was, as always, doing its job with all the efficiency of someone who neither understood nor cared to understand its job.
None of this currently mattered to Lily Potter, whose husband is dead. She didn’t scream. Screaming would imply a certain level of vocal cord coordination that was impossible in her grief. Instead, she made a sound that sat somewhere between a gasp and the structural failure of a cooling tower. She looked at Sirius, searching for the ghost of the man who was supposed to be standing right behind him, supposed to be making a joke about how ‘being dead’ was a bit too much commitment for a Saturday night and could they perhaps negotiate for a light coma instead?
“You.” She said, and started forward, and Sirius backed up like she would burn him. “You were with him.”
Sirius flinched. “We were ambushed, Lils. It all happened too fast, I held him in the mud and I tried so hard to pull the life back into him, but it just…wouldn’t stay.” This, of course, was accurate, given that James’s death was newly ordained by the Universe, but Sirius had no way of knowing he was arguing with cosmic accounting and therefore felt the crushing, personal weight of a failure that could have been prevented if only he’d been a bit more efficient at defying the laws of mortality.
Harry, sensing that the two people in the room were currently experiencing a total systems failure, increased the volume of his wailing in an attempt to communicate his distress at these latest events. At this, Lily’s grief, which had been a vast, cold ocean, suddenly found itself a very specific, hot-tempered shore. She jerked forward, her movements possessing all the grace of a puppet whose strings had been cut and then reattached by an amateur.
“You’re alive,” she said, and the accusation was laced into her voice with the weight of the hole left when there was one man standing where there should be two. “He’s gone, and you’re standing in my kitchen. How dare you come back here? How dare you be the one to come back?” Her voice broke.
Sirius issued no defence. There is no arguable defence for being alive when your best mate wasn’t, and he knew it. He stood, arms limp at his sides, feeling like a man who had survived a shipwreck only to realise he’d forgotten how to swim. He reached out a hand behind him, trying to find the counter to support his weight and the considerably heavier weight of James’s life, too, but the counter inched away from him and he couldn’t reach it. He was unmoored, unanchored, in the middle of the ocean, unable to swim, with nothing around him but cold water and sharks taking an interest. He reached forward, perhaps to latch onto Lily, onto Harry, onto the only people left of James, like a dog whose owner died, but Lily recoiled.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch him.” She pulled Harry closer to her, creating a two-person fortress against a world that had suddenly become much more dangerous. “Go. Leave. Go report to your Order. Tell Dumbledore his greatest sponsor is dead.”
Sirius opened his mouth to speak. But the air was suddenly interrupted by a bright silvery light. A Patronus—a massive, shimmering phoenix—burst through the kitchen window, ignoring the glass with the casual arrogance all entities who didn’t believe in solid matter exuded. It opened its beak to emit the too calm, terrifyingly reasonable sounding voice Albus Dumbledore had perfected in his old age. “To Sirius Black. I require you at Hogwarts. I fear I cannot reach James.”
The phoenix vanished, leaving the kitchen darker than it had been before. The silence that followed felt like a fuse that had just reached the gunpowder and was currently ticking through the final, breathless milliseconds before a massive explosion.
“You should go.” Lily said with a sigh, defeat in her voice. Sirius looked up at her and saw she had sunk into a kitchen chair, having suddenly aged ten years. “The Order needs to know.”
Hogwarts Gates, 17:15
The apparition from Godric's Hollow to the gates of Hogwarts was an unusually violent displacement of reality, but Sirius Black barely felt it.
Apparition is frequently described by those who have experienced it--and subsequently survived to complain about it--as being squeezed through a very long, very tight tube. Under normal circumstances, the tube is a relatively cooperative companion in this process; it expects you, and expands to accommodate your various limbs and internal organs, and eventually spits you out with nothing more than a sense of nausea, the severity of which has been found to be directly correlated to the distance you travelled.
Tonight, however, the tube was in a foul mood.
Because James Potter's death had been the result of an unplanned audit by the Universe, the magical infrastructure of Great Britain was experiencing a bit of server lag. When Sirius Black attempted to apparate to Hogwarts Gates, he did so with such frantic, uncoordinated energy that he essentially broke into the transit dimension without knocking.
The tube, which was dealing with a backlog, lag, and had now not been asked to expand and was rather rudely broken into, was very understandably deeply offended.
It reacted to Sirius's intrusion with the type of hostility usually reserved for sharks and cobras. It imitated a muggle car baler, doing everything in its power to crush him into a uniform rectangle with its vengeful, lung-collapsing force.
Sirius noticed none of this, including his missing eyebrow, when he arrived at the Hogwarts Gates. He rushed forward, breathing heavily and walking without his usual flawless gait. He felt the Hogwarts wards, embracing him, watching him, welcoming him.
Beyond the gates, the Hogwarts Grounds stretched out with a sort of sprawling, self-important majesty that only a thousand-year-old institution could afford to maintain. The lawn was a vast sea of dark green that swayed in the wind. It was the kind of grass that did not really grow; rather, it was so perfect one wouldn't be surprised if it simply appeared overnight. To the left, the Forbidden Forest loomed. It emitted an aura like a dark, matted rug that the school has swept all its inconvenient secrets under. In the distance, the Black Lake lay flat and obsidian black. Its surface was so still that it looked less like water and more like a hole in the world, if holes in the world were filled with Giant Squids and Mermaids and the sort of ancient damp dampness that only the Scottish would dream up.
The Hogwarts wards were not, as popularly believed, the strongest set of wards in Great Britain. Sirius remembered scoffing at the idea in his first year, having grown up in the Black Wards. This had resulted in him being thrown from the boats into the lake, spluttering and cold. As it turns out, the Hogwarts Wards were not the strongest wards in Britain, but they were certainly prideful.
The grounds were quiet. Sirius saw smoke billowing from Hagrid's hut, but otherwise there was no movement but the swaying of the trees. The surface of the Lake was quiet, and as Sirius walked up towards the main doors, his mind was not on the impending meeting or admiring the landscape he had missed like a limb when he had graduated, stuck in his tiny London apartment.
The walk from the Gates to the Castle doors was clearly designed by someone who believed that if a visitor wasn’t exhausted by the time they reached the doors, they weren’t sufficiently intimidated and would thus have to walk some more. Sirius endured the trek with the staggering, uneven gait of a man who had forgotten how his feet worked. He felt as though he were carrying James’s ghost on his back, and James, in death, had become surprisingly heavy, in possession of a sort of dense, existential mass that the laws of gravity had not quite worked out yet. The gravel under his boots made a rhythmic, crunching sound. The Forbidden Forest loomed as a Forbidden Forest should, watching him with thousands of carefully hidden eyes, most of which belonged to creatures that were currently wondering if a grief-stricken wizard tasted differently than a happy one. (The general consensus among the Acromantulas was that grief made the meat a bit too salty, but they were willing to make exceptions in particularly dire circumstances, such as when a late night snack was needed.)
Sirius did not look to the trees and he did not look up at the stars, which were currently twinkling with a terrifying lack of empathy, even for the Black Heir. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on the castle.
The castle was a sight to behold, not so much a building but a pile of architectural second thoughts held together by sheer, stubborn will. One looked upon the castle and knew the four people who built it had very different views on how a castle should look. It was a forest of turrets, battlements, and windows that never quite lined up the way they should. Some windows glowed with a faint, amber light.
His mind was on Lily Potter, and his godson, who were now alone in the world. The boy would grow up without a father, and he was the last Potter. Lily did not know enough to raise him properly, to prepare him for the world. They had only been married two years. James's parents were dead from an attack on Potter Manor. There was no one left to guide the boy.
Why? Sirius asked the void, Why leave this up to me, James? I don't know where to start.
He realised that once he entered the castle, the secret would be out. James’s death would stop being a private abyss and start being a public event. It would be analysed, categorised, filed away as a statistic in this war by men who did not value James as a human life further than his use.
His thoughts were interrupted when the doors swung open as he approached, with a silent, well-oiled smoothness that suggested the castle had been expecting him, and he stepped into the entrance hall. The air was as cold indoors as it was outdoors, cold in that way where one cannot be certain it is the air and not one’s imagination. It was the kind of cold that doesn’t just settle on your skin, but moves in, unpacks its bags, and starts questioning your life choices like a concerned mother-in-law. His leather jacket, which had always felt like a second-skin, now felt like a leaden shroud. He felt aware of every stitch, every drop of mud, the lingering scent of smoke from the skirmish and the stain from James’s blood. He felt like a walking crime scene, a dirty smudge on the fairytale landscape of the castle.
The headmaster’s office was guarded by two gargoyles. On the door, there was a knocker in the shape of a Griffin. This creature somehow managed to look both mythical and profoundly judgemental. Sirius uttered the password, and pushed inside without knocking.
The room was, as always, a house to clutter that only a man with a hundred-and-fifty year lifespan and a complete lack of sensible hobbies could accumulate. It was filled with silver instruments that clicked, whirred, and even emitted small puffs of smoke, all of which considered their jobs to be of the utmost importance. Many of them measured things that Albus Dumbledore found fascinating and the rest of the world found entirely irrelevant.
Dumbledore stood by the window. He was draped in flamboyant red robes, and his long, silver beard was tucked into his belt to prevent it from getting caught in the clutter. He turned as Sirius entered.
“Sirius,” Dumbledore said. His voice was velvety, “I am relieved to see you. I have been attempting to reach James for thirty-two minutes.” Sirius was silent. He stood by one of the seats, his head bowed. “The Fidelius has grown thin. It is pulsing with a frequency that suggests its primary anchor has…passed.”
“I’m afraid I don’t bring good news, Headmaster.” Sirius glanced up, and noted that Dumbledore’s face was pale and grave. “James is dead, Albus.”
The instruments continued to run–to tick, whir, puff, and click–unaware of the Universe’s catastrophic accounting error, in the silence that followed. Dumbledore was staring, now, at Sirius, with wide eyes. He moved to his desk, his robes sweeping the floor with a sound like a long, tired sigh, and sat.
“I see.” The Headmaster did not look shocked–shock required a level of surprise that he had long since traded for a high-level subscription to ‘inevitability’. He did, however, look like a man who had just watched a very complex clockwork mechanism drop a crucial gear and was now lost as to how to replace it. “I take it the mission was unsuccessful?”
“Does it matter?” Sirius sat, too. His voice was the jagged edge of a cliff. “James is dead. The logistics of his death will not bring him back.”
“It matters.” Dumbledore said, and his eyes, his blue, twinkling eyes which usually suggested he knew a joke you didn’t, were now cold as a winter morning. “We need to know how to proceed.”
Sirius sighed, and recounted the night. He left out his visit to the Hollow.
Dumbledore looked almost as tired as Sirius felt. Sirius’s eyes were downcast, and he realised with a start that the Headmaster’s hands were shaking. “I did not account for this. The remaining Potters will have to be moved. With James dead, the Hollow is no longer a sanctuary. The Fidelius cannot sustain itself on a widow and a child; the magic requires a Trinity. It is a structural requirement.”
“Move them where?” Sirius said. He had not often seen the man like this.
“Hogwarts is the obvious choice, though perhaps too visible. I have a safehouse in the Midlands. It is under my own protection. I will send an escort at dawn–Moody, perhaps another auror. They will collect them and bring them here.”
He said this like they were an inconvenient parcel that had arrived at the wrong time. “And what of Lily? What if she doesn’t wish to be moved?” Sirius said, his voice sharp.
Dumbledore looked at him, and for a second, the mask of the kindly Headmaster slipped completely, and Sirius saw the man who had defeated Grindelwald, who had sent others to do the work, who viewed the world as a series of necessary sacrifices in a game only he was qualified to referee. “Lily is a grieving widow, Sirius. She is in no state to make tactical decisions. Her son is one of the greatest assets we possess.”
He stood, and Sirius stood with him. The headmaster’s words rang in his head. “I require you to go to the Hollow for the night. Your presence will keep the Fidelius satisfied until tomorrow. Guard the Potters until dawn. Do not let Lily leave the perimeter. Do not let her make any…emotional mistakes.”
Sirius looked at the man he had followed for years. He suddenly did not see the man he thought he was anymore. He saw a man who did not see a tragedy, but rather a breach of security.
“You aren’t going to her. To inform her.” Sirius said. It wasn’t a question. It felt like he was realising something he does not yet understand.
“I have many threads to hold together, Sirius. The news of James’s death will embolden the Dark Lord. I must coordinate with the Ministry and the Order. Go. Guard the child. He is everything now.”
Sirius nodded, his mind spinning like a whirlwind, the dismissal obvious. He headed for the exit, intent on returning to the Hollow to sit in the dark and think–an activity he usually avoided, but one that seemed suddenly, violently necessary.