Chapter Text
London, 19 September 1979
There was a woman dying on the fifth floor of a Muggle hospital in Whitechapel, and no one in the building knew she was a witch.
That was how she'd wanted it. She had walked in through the front doors three hours earlier under a false name and a borrowed coat, answered every question with a half-truth, and signed the paperwork with a biro that kept skipping. She'd found it funny at the time. Ariadne Belby found almost everything funny. It was the family defect.
She didn't find it funny now.
"You're doing beautifully, love," said the midwife, and Ariadne wanted to tell her that no, she wasn't, that something had gone wrong inside her and not one person in this room had the faintest chance of fixing it. There was a spell for this. She knew the spell. She had studied the spell.
Her wand was in her bag, on the chair, two and a half metres away.
Two and a half metres is a very short distance for everyone in the world except the person lying down.
She thought, with a strange cold clarity, that she had been extraordinarily stupid. Not for getting pregnant at nineteen by a man she barely knew, she couldn't manage to regret that, not really. She had been stupid because she had been so frightened of what her grandmother would say. Because she had chosen shame over St Mungo's. Because she had measured her own life in units of gossip.
At 4:47 in the morning, the baby was born.
Ariadne had time to hear her cry. She had time to turn her head and see, blurred, a wet tuft of dark hair. She had time to think, with something almost like delight: oh! That's his.
And she had time, still, for one word. Just one. The midwife would later swear it had been Hermione, because that was what went on the certificate, but in truth the midwife wasn't certain of anything, the voice had come out too low, too torn, and what she actually heard was a sound that began with an H and ended in a long vowel.
It might have been a name. It might have been him.
At 5:12, Ariadne Belby died in a hospital where nobody knew her magic, her real surname, or the name of her child's father.
Four hundred miles away, in a rented flat in Edinburgh, Sirius Black was asleep face-down in a pillow that wasn't his, hungover, happy, and entirely unaware that he had just become a father and a widower of a woman he had never married, all within twenty-five minutes.
It would take him twelve years, ten months and nine days to find out.