Chapter Text
Sirius Black had always imagined death would be louder.
It was a ridiculous thought to have in the middle of a battle, especially one taking place in the Department of Mysteries, where absolutely nothing was quiet. Spells cracked through the chamber in violent streaks of red and green and white, stone splintered beneath curses, someone shouted from somewhere behind him, and broken glass scattered across the floor with the bright, delicate sound of falling ice. The air smelled of scorched fabric, old dust, blood, and magic, and in the middle of all of it Sirius was laughing, actually laughing, the sound tearing out of him with the reckless delight of someone twenty-one again instead of thirty-six and half-feral from too many years spent locked inside cells, houses, and his own head.
“Come on!” he shouted, grinning across the chamber at Bellatrix.
There she was, his darling cousin, all tangled black hair and fever-bright eyes, teeth bared in a smile that had stopped being beautiful years ago. She flung another curse toward him and Sirius twisted out of the way almost lazily, feeling the heat of it pass close enough to his ribs to warm his robes before it struck the stone arch behind him.
“Is that the best you’ve got?”
“Sirius!”
Harry’s voice cut through the chamber with a sharpness no spell could have managed.
Sirius looked.
Only for a second.
That was all Bellatrix needed.
The curse struck him squarely in the chest.
There was no pain, which was the first thing Sirius noticed. No burning, no tearing, no sensation of bone giving way or blood leaving his body, only a hard and strangely weightless impact that punched the breath out of him and tipped him backward before he understood what had happened. His smile vanished. Harry’s face sharpened in front of him, not thirteen and filthy and furious in the Shrieking Shack, not a baby asleep against James’s chest while Lily complained that both Potter men were determined to ruin every photograph she took, but fifteen, terrified, green eyes enormous and mouth already forming his name.
Sirius tried to reach for him.
Harry lunged forward.
Remus caught him.
Good.
The thought came with such absurd, immediate relief that Sirius almost laughed again, because of course Harry would try to follow. Harry had always been reckless when someone he loved was in danger, and if that was not James Potter’s son through and through then Sirius had no idea what was.
Then the Veil touched his back.
For one impossible instant the world seemed to stop around him. The battle faded first, then Bellatrix’s triumphant scream, then Harry’s face, until even the chamber itself seemed to dissolve. The ancient fabric brushed across Sirius’s shoulders with the softness of cool fingers, and then there was nothing beneath him.
No floor. No stone. No Ministry.
No body.
Only darkness.
Sirius waited for death.
He had thought about it before, naturally. Azkaban gave a man a great deal of time to think about things he would rather not think about, and death had been one of the kinder subjects. Sometimes Sirius had imagined James waiting for him, not in any particularly religious sense because Sirius had stopped believing in most of what his mother called sacred before he was old enough to understand the words, but simply because it felt impossible that James could cease to exist entirely. In Sirius’s imagination James was always twenty-one, always grinning, always looking at him as if Sirius had merely been late to Quidditch practice instead of dead.
Took you long enough, Padfoot.
Lily was usually there too, rolling her eyes while James crushed him into a hug.
Regulus was harder.
Sirius had never known what Regulus would say.
That was the problem.
He knew James so well that Sirius could predict entire arguments that had never happened, but Regulus had died without Sirius ever really understanding him. For years Sirius had believed his younger brother had become exactly what their parents wanted: obedient, bitter, blood-purist enough to take the Mark willingly and cowardly enough to serve Voldemort.
Then, only months before tonight, Sirius had found the diaries.
They had been hidden in Regulus’s room in a place so mundane that Walburga had apparently never bothered looking there, and Sirius had spent hours on the floor with the first volume open across his knees, reading cramped handwriting that began with school notes and family complaints and became, gradually, something else entirely. Names. Dates. References to obscure texts on soul magic. Questions written in the margins. The same word appearing again and again until Sirius had understood what his brother had been trying to prove.
Horcrux.
Then Kreacher.
The cave.
The locket.
The plan.
Sirius had read the final entries with his back against Regulus’s bed and his hands shaking so violently he had torn one of the pages by accident, the discovery that Regulus had not died for Voldemort like a coward, he had died trying to destroy him and Sirius had spent sixteen years thinking him a fool.
Perhaps Regulus would be waiting too.
Perhaps there would finally be time for Sirius to say—
Something slammed into him.
Hard.
Air tore into his lungs so violently that Sirius gasped, his eyes flying open to darkness that was entirely different from what had surrounded him a moment before. This darkness had shape. A ceiling. Curtains. Furniture. The faint grey suggestion of moonlight.
Sirius stared upward, heart hammering so hard it hurt.
For several seconds he did not move.
Then he inhaled again.
Dust. Old wood. Candle wax. Something faintly floral and unpleasant.
His brow furrowed.
He knew that smell.
No.
Impossible.
Sirius pushed himself upright too quickly and the room spun around him. His hand shot down against the mattress and stayed there.
Mattress.
Bed.
He was in a bed.
He stared at his fingers.
Something was wrong.
They were too pale, too smooth, too thin. There were no old scars across the knuckles, no veins standing sharply beneath skin made too fragile by Azkaban, no faint tremor that appeared when he was exhausted. His nails were clean. His hands looked—
Young.
Sirius flexed them once.
Then again.
“What the fuck?”
His voice cracked.
He stopped breathing.
Slowly, with growing horror, Sirius lifted one hand to his throat.
No.
No, no, absolutely not.
He threw the blankets aside and nearly fell out of bed because his legs tangled beneath him in a body that was too short, too light, too quick. He caught himself without thinking, balance snapping into place with the instinctive ease of someone whose joints had not spent twelve years stiffening in a prison cell.
Sirius stumbled toward the mirror but he knew before he reached it, some deep part of him knew and that did not help.
A boy stared back.
Long black hair fell untidily around a pale face that had not yet sharpened with age. High cheekbones were still full, not hollowed by starvation. Grey eyes looked too large because Sirius remembered seeing them framed by harder lines, deeper shadows, twenty extra years.
There was no Azkaban in this young face.
Sirius grabbed the edge of the dressing table.
The boy in the mirror did the same.
A teenager.
He knew this face.
He had hated it once.
Walburga had called it beautiful. Bellatrix had called it wasted on him. James had once told Sirius he looked like a girl when his hair grew this long and then thrown himself backward over a sofa when Sirius attempted to remove his eyebrows with a hex.
James.
Sirius’s knees nearly gave out.
He turned from the mirror and the room hit him all at once.
His bedroom.
Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.
The dark green wallpaper Walburga insisted was respectable. The old wardrobe Sirius had carved obscenities into and repaired badly enough that the scratches were still visible under the varnish. The scorch mark beside the window where he and James had once tried charming a Muggle firework into spelling WALBURGA IS A HAG and instead set the curtains on fire.
Except the curtains were whole.
Sirius crossed the room and grabbed them with both hands as though the fabric might anchor him to reality.
Whole.
He tore them aside.
London stretched beyond the glass, familiar and wrong. Cars moved through the street below. A man in flared trousers walked along the pavement carrying a newspaper. Sirius’s own reflection floated faintly over the scene.
A boy.
He stumbled backward and hit something with his heel.
His old, his new?, Hogwarts trunk.
Uniform robes were folded inside, and on top of them lay an envelope he knew, Sirius stared at it for far too long before bending to snatch it up.
"Mr Sirius Black,..."
His fingers began to shake.
He tore it open, unfolded the parchment, and saw the Hogwarts crest, the letter anouncing that term begins 1 September.
His gaze dropped lower.
Sixth-year supplies.
Sirius swallowed and forced himself to look at the date.
31 August 1976.
The parchment slipped from his fingers.
“No.”
The room remained unchanged.
“No.”
His heartbeat was becoming painful.
This had to be a dream. A hallucination. Some final cruelty of the Veil while his brain died. Perhaps that was what death did: gave you exactly what you wanted and let you believe in it for a few minutes before everything went black.
But it has to be a lie, because James was dead.
Lily has sacrified herself.
Regulus died alone.
And Peter was—
Sirius lowered his hands.
Peter.
The name cut through everything.
He moved before he consciously decided to looking for his wand.
Where was his wand?
Desk.
He yanked the drawer open.
There it was.
Dark wood. Familiar grip. His first wand, the wand the Ministry had snapped after his arrest.
Sirius wrapped his hand around it.
Magic surged up his arm.
Young magic.
Wild, immediate, powerful.
And very much real.
Sirius nearly dropped the wand.
Dreams did not feel like this.
Then came a sound from the corridor.
Footsteps.
Sirius went perfectly still.
One step.
Another.
Light.
Measured.
Familiar.
His hand tightened around the wand.
The footsteps approached his door.
The handle turned.
The door opened.
Regulus Black stood on the other side.
Sirius forgot how to breathe.
His brother was fifteen.
Fifteen.
Not the stiff, pale boy Sirius remembered from their later years at home. Not the haunted face reconstructed through old photographs and diary pages. Not a body somewhere at the bottom of an underground lake.
Fifteen.
Slight, dark-haired, already too composed for his age and dressed neatly despite the hour, because of course he was. He had not yet grown fully into the sharp Black features they shared. There was still softness around his jaw, still something unmistakably young in the grey eyes that dropped immediately to the wand Sirius was pointing at his chest.
Regulus stopped.
His face closed.
“What are you doing?”
Sirius could not answer.
Regulus glanced at the wand again, then back at him.
“If you’re going to hex me, could you at least wait until after breakfast? Mother will blame me if you damage the wallpaper again.”
Sirius stared.
Regulus shifted slightly.
There was irritation there, certainly, but underneath it Sirius saw something else now that he knew how to look.
Caution.
That hurt more than it should have.
Because Sirius remembered that expression.
He simply had not understood it at fifteen.
Regulus expected Sirius to be cruel.
Not necessarily violent. Sirius had never made a habit of hexing his little brother without cause, no matter what Regulus apparently believed at the moment, but Regulus knew enough to expect the sneer, the cutting joke, the inevitable little comment about Slytherin or Mother’s perfect heir or some other thing Sirius had once thought harmless because he had been too angry to understand where the anger landed.
The diaries flashed through his mind, making Sirius lowered his wand.
Regulus’s eyebrows rose.
“What?”
Sirius opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
Regulus frowned.
“You look awful.”
A laugh escaped Sirius before he could stop it.
It sounded wrong.
Broken.
Regulus took half a step backward.
Sirius saw that too.
Of course he did.
Azkaban had made him excellent at watching people.
He hated that his brother was wary of him.
Had Regulus always been?, no, he hadn't, there was a time before war, and light and dark sides, and family duties and green ties.
The thought turned Sirius’s stomach.
“Reggie.”
The name slipped out.
Regulus froze.
So did Sirius.
He had not called him that in decades.
Maybe not since they were small.
Regulus’s expression changed so quickly Sirius almost missed it. Something open and young flickered across his face, then disappeared behind the cool blankness every Black child learned sooner or later.
“What did you call me?”
Sirius stared at him.
Regulus glanced toward the corridor as though someone might have heard.
“What are you doing?”
“I—”
His voice cracked again.
Sirius cleared his throat.
Regulus’s suspicion deepened.
“You’re being strange.”
“Yeah.”
“That isn’t an explanation.”
“I know.”
Regulus folded his arms.
The gesture was so familiar, so unmistakably Black, that Sirius nearly smiled.
Instead his eyes burned.
Regulus noticed.
His arms lowered.
“Sirius?”
There was concern in his voice.
Small.
Unwanted, perhaps, but immediate.
Sirius had to look away.
His gaze landed on the calendar pinned beside the desk.
August 31.
1975.
Tomorrow they would take the Hogwarts Express.
James would be there.
Alive.
Sirius curled his fingers around his wand.
Regulus took one tentative step farther into the room.
“Sirius.”
Sirius looked at him again.
Fourteen.
He wanted, suddenly and violently, to cross the distance between them and drag him into his arms. He wanted to tell him never to trust Bellatrix, never to take the Mark, never to let Voldemort near Kreacher, never to go into a cave alone. He wanted to apologize for abandoning him, for not understanding him, for finding out the truth when there was nothing left to do with it.
Except none of those things had happened.
Not yet.
Regulus had not joined the Death Eaters.
Sirius had not run away.
James had not died.
Harry had not even been born.
Peter had not—
Peter.
Magic pulsed sharply through Sirius’s wand.
Regulus’s eyes flicked toward it.
Sirius forced his grip to loosen.
“What day is it?” he asked.
Regulus blinked.
“What?”
“The date.”
“You’ve just looked at the calendar.”
“Tell me.”
Regulus stared at him.
“Thirty-first of August.”
“What year?”
Now there was no irritation left in Regulus’s expression.
Only alarm.
“1975.”
Sirius shut his eyes.
This was real.
Or at least real enough.
Twenty years.
He had gone back twenty years.
How?
Why?
The Veil.
It had to be the Veil, but nobody understood the Veil. Hermione had read about it and people like Dumbledore probably knew more than they ever said. The Unspeakables perhaps...
Merlin, Hermione...
Harry...
Sirius’s chest tightened.
They were gone.
No. Not gone, just not born yet.
Somewhere in this world Lily Evans was sixteen years old.
James Potter was sixteen.
Harry was nothing... yet.
The realization hit harder than Bellatrix’s curse.
If Sirius changed too much...
No.
James and Lily had to happen, that was fixed, a non-negotiable, Harry had to exist, funny, witty and kind-hearted Harry had to grace the world with his existence.
Whatever else Sirius tore apart, whatever future he interfered with, whatever lives he dragged kicking and screaming away from death, Harry stayed.
“Sirius!”
Regulus had grabbed his wrist.
Sirius looked down.
Regulus seemed to realize what he had done and released him immediately.
“Are you ill?”
“No.”
“You look ill.”
“I’ve looked worse.”
Regulus gave him a strange look.
Right.
Sixteen.
Sirius rubbed a hand over his face and was startled all over again by smooth skin and no stubble.
Christ.
He was sixteen
Sixteen years old with thirty-six years of memory crammed into his skull.
He laughed.
He could not help it.
Regulus stepped back again, watching him as if deciding whether to fetch someone.
Sirius laughed harder, because James was alive and Regulus was alive and Peter was alive too and Sirius could kill him.
That thought stopped the laughter.
Regulus continued staring.
Sirius looked away.
No.
He would not.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
He wanted to, of course. There were twelve years of Dementors inside him that wanted Peter Pettigrew dead so badly he could almost taste it, but Peter was fifteen. He had not betrayed them. He had not handed James and Lily to Voldemort. He had not framed Sirius.
Not yet.
And Sirius knew better than most what it meant to be punished for a crime before anyone bothered asking whether you had committed it.
The irony was revolting.
“I’m fine,” Sirius said.
Regulus looked entirely unconvinced.
“Mother said breakfast in ten minutes.”
Mother, no, Walburga.
Sirius’s body went rigid before he could stop it.
Regulus noticed.
“You’re going to start something, aren’t you?”
The question was tired.
Too tired for fourteen.
Sirius looked at him.
“What?”
“With Mother.”
“I usually do.”
“Yes.”
Regulus’s mouth twisted.
“And then you leave.”
The words were quiet.
They landed harder than Sirius expected.
Regulus seemed to regret them almost immediately. His expression smoothed into perfect neutrality.
“I’ll tell her you’re coming.”
He turned.
“Regulus.”
His brother stopped in the doorway, but Sirius did not know what he intended to say.
Sorry was impossible. Too large. Too early.
I love you would probably make Regulus assume Sirius had been cursed.
Don’t become a Death Eater seemed excessive before breakfast.
So Sirius said the only thing that came to him.
“Wait for me.”
Regulus looked over his shoulder.
Sirius swallowed.
“We’ll go down together.”
Silence.
Regulus stared at him as though Sirius had announced a sudden interest in embroidery.
Then he said, very cautiously, “Why?”
Because I left you alone.
Because you died.
Because I found out too late that you were brave.
Because I spent years thinking you had chosen them when perhaps you had simply been the child left behind.
Because if this is real, I am not leaving you behind again.
Sirius shrugged.
“Because I said so.”
Regulus rolled his eyes.
The gesture was so normal, so much of a boy, nothing of the estrange brother he last saw sneering at him on his last Hogwards year, it almost make Sirius broke.
“Fine.”
He stepped into the corridor but did not leave.
Sirius stared at him.
Regulus frowned.
“Well?”
“You’re actually waiting?”
“You told me to.”
That nearly did it.
Sirius turned away before his face betrayed him.
“Give me a minute.”
He heard Regulus lean against the wall outside.
The door remained open.
Sirius had to look at himself in the mirror again.
Sixteen.
Tomorrow Hogwarts.
James.
Remus.
Peter.
Lily.
Voldemort somewhere out there, already becoming the thing Sirius remembered.
And Horcruxes.
His gaze sharpened.
Regulus’s diaries did not exist yet.
Not the ones Sirius had read.
But Sirius remembered them.
Not every sentence, not every obscure citation Regulus had copied into the margins, but enough.
Horcruxes.
More than one.
Voldemort had split his soul, has made himself the utmost kind of monster, twice has Sirius seen it, and now was back to live it one more time, that meant something could be done differently.
His heartbeat changed.
James did not have to die.
The thought arrived so softly that Sirius almost missed it.
He stared at his reflection.
James did not have to die.
Lily did not have to die.
Regulus did not have to die.
Remus did not have to spend half his life alone.
Harry, his godson, James's son.
Harry would still exist.
He had to.
But Harry did not have to grow up in a cupboard.
He did not have to face Voldemort at eleven years old.
He did not have to watch Cedric die.
He did not have to... so many things, so little years.
Sirius stopped.
There were too many griefs.
Too many moments he had spent arriving after the damage was already done.
He could not fix everything at once.
That was how people lost wars.
One thing at a time.
First, survive breakfast with Walburga Black.
Second, get to Hogwarts.
Third, do not murder Peter Pettigrew on the train.
Sirius considered that.
Fine.
Actually succeed at murdering Peter Pettigrew and leave no witnesses.
His reflection smiled faintly.
There he was.
Somewhere beneath thirty-six years of grief, Azkaban, rage, and exhaustion, the boy Sirius used to be was still capable of appreciating a sensible plan.
The smile faded when he looked toward the doorway.
Regulus was still waiting.
Alive.
Sirius dressed quickly, pulling on trousers and a shirt with hands that were steadier now. He was not calm. Sirius was not entirely sure he had ever been calm in his life, but he could focus. He had always been good at that when something mattered.
He picked up his wand and paused beside the trunk.
His Hogwarts robes waited inside.
Sixth year.
He had twenty years of hindsight.
He could afford patience.
Probably.
At minimum, he could attempt it until lunch.
Sirius stepped into the corridor.
Regulus was leaning against the opposite wall with his arms folded, and he straightened at once.
For a moment neither of them moved.
Then Regulus glanced toward the staircase.
“So?”
Sirius followed his gaze.
Somewhere below, Walburga’s voice carried faintly through the house.
His body remembered before his mind did. Shoulders tight. Jaw set. Every instinct preparing for impact, except Sirius was not really fifteen and Walburga Black had no idea what had just walked back into her house.
A slow smile spread across his face.
Regulus eyed him.
“Oh, no.”
“What?”
“I know that expression.”
“You’ve missed it.”
“I absolutely have not.”
Sirius started toward the stairs.
After half a second Regulus fell into step beside him.
Side by side.
Such a small thing.
Sirius nearly stumbled over the weight of it.
He had spent most of his first life reacting to disasters after they happened.
James died, and Sirius went after Peter.
Regulus died, and Sirius learned the truth years too late.
Harry suffered, and Sirius returned to him after twelve years.
Voldemort came back, and everyone scrambled to fight another war they had never truly finished.
Always afterward.
Always too late.
Sirius reached the top of the stairs with Regulus beside him and tightened his hand around the banister.
Not this time.
This time he was here first.
And Death help anyone who tried to take them from him again.