Archive of Our Own

September 1971

Sirius had been told to find Narcissa, and his mother had said it often enough that he could still hear her voice over the noise of the train.

Sirius had answered his mother properly. He had even allowed her to brush an invisible mark from his shoulder, because struggling would have made a scene and she had a particular way of punishing scenes once there was nobody left to see.

Now he was halfway down a carriage, dragging a trunk which caught against every second compartment door, and he had no intention of finding anybody related to him.

It would have been easier to enjoy that decision if the trunk had been lighter. He had refused a porter's help because his father was watching, and because refusing had felt like the sort of thing a person leaving home ought to do. His father wasn't watching now. Sirius changed hands, examined the red line across his palm and began to suspect that carrying one's own things was a foolish point on which to make a stand.

He stopped outside a compartment containing one boy and an astonishing quantity of food.

The boy was kneeling on the seat with his back to the passage, trying to force the window farther down. His hair stood up at the back as though he had slept on it and considered the matter finished. A pair of glasses lay beside an open bag, and a woman on the platform was attempting to pass another parcel through the gap.

"Mum, it won't fit," the boy complained, pulling at the frame with both hands. "Look, that's as far as it goes. I'm not doing it wrong."

"Turn the bag the other way, James. Your father managed with the first one."

"Dad squashed the first one. I've already got six sandwiches, anyway. How many people d'you think I'm going to meet?"

"Enough to share with, I hope. Stop arguing with me through a window and take the bottom."

Sirius laughed before he could stop himself, and the boy looked round at once. For a moment Sirius considered moving on. He knew how to appear as though he hadn't been looking at somebody, and he could probably manage the trunk another few doors before his arm came off.

Then the boy glanced at it and said, "You can come in, if you want. Only could you give us a hand with this first? She's not going to leave until it's through."

Sirius abandoned the trunk in the passage and went to the window. Between them they pulled the parcel into an opening much too small for it, while James's mother issued instructions which became less useful as the paper began to tear. One handle gave way. James leaned out to catch it, Sirius caught the back of his jumper, and the woman below caught the bottom of the bag before all three of them lost it.

The parcel landed on the seat with a soft, expensive-sounding squelch. James peeled back the damaged paper and examined the result, while Sirius wondered whether he ought to offer to repair something he had helped ruin.

"There we are," James said, apparently untroubled. "If that was cake, it's a different shape now."

"Thank your friend," his mother told him, apparently satisfied with the arrangement. She smiled at Sirius through the window, including him so readily that he wasn't quite sure where to look.

"I don't know him yet. He only just came in." James glanced at Sirius as though pretending otherwise would have been rude, then moved his bag out of the way without being asked.

"Then perhaps you should introduce yourselves, rather than keeping hold of each other's clothes."

Sirius let go of the jumper. He hadn't realised he was still gripping it, and the warmth which climbed into his face was so irritating that he looked down at the bag as though its condition required his attention. James merely stuck his head through the window again to say goodbye. A man beside his mother lifted a hand and reminded him to write, and James promised in the tone of someone renewing an agreement he had hoped was already settled.

The whistle blew, louder than Sirius expected. He turned so quickly that his shoe nearly came down on the glasses, and James snatched them away.

"Steady on. Can't see a thing without these." He put them on, blinked at Sirius and then looked towards the door. "Is that yours blocking everyone in? We'd better move it before somebody falls over."

They fetched the trunk together. James suggested the luggage rack, Sirius looked at the height of it, and after an unsuccessful attempt which trapped James's fingers they agreed to leave it beneath the window. By then the platform had begun to move. James pressed close to the glass and waved with his whole arm; Sirius sat with his back to it, pretending to be interested in the fastening on his case.

He hadn't looked to see whether Regulus was waving. Once the train gathered speed, it was too late to change his mind.

"James Potter," the other boy announced, turning from the window and offering a sandwich rather than a hand. "Do you want ham? There's another sort, but Mum wouldn't tell me what because she said I'd decide I didn't like it."

"Sirius Black." He took the sandwich only after giving his name, because there was usually a moment which followed it and he preferred to get that over with.

James paused, the paper still between his fingers. Sirius recognised the pause from drawing rooms and introductions: a moment to place the family, remember its importance and adjust one's expression accordingly.

"Like the star?" James asked. "We've got a book about those. I tried looking for them from the roof, but Dad said if I fell off he wasn't explaining it to Mum."

Sirius stared at him for a moment before remembering to release the paper. "You could use a window. Most people manage without climbing onto anything."

"There's a tree in the way of mine. Have you got a broom?" James leaned forwards, forgetting the sandwich in his hand as soon as there was a possibility of discussing flying.

The change of subject was so immediate that Sirius almost laughed again. He answered, and James launched into a description of the one he had been allowed to use at home, including its best features, its worst features and the unreasonable restrictions his parents had imposed on flying over the orchard. Sirius found himself disagreeing with him before he had decided whether that was safe, and James disagreed straight back without seeming offended.

They were halfway through an argument about whether speed mattered more than turning when the door slid open.

A thin boy stood outside with a battered case held in both hands. His sleeves ended a little short of his wrists, and a pale mark showed beneath one eye. He looked at the empty seat, then at the food occupying it, as though he would rather go on walking than make them move something they wanted there.

"Is anybody sitting here? I can try farther down if you're waiting for someone."

"Only lunch," James said. "We've got rather too much of it. Shift that bag, will you, Sirius?"

Sirius put the parcel on the floor. The boy thanked them and sat carefully, keeping his case between his shoes until James pointed out that nobody was likely to steal it while they were all watching.

"Remus Lupin," he offered, with a small smile which arrived a moment after the name. "And I don't mind holding it. It's all right here."

James introduced them both and offered him a sandwich. Remus said he had brought his own, then opened a tin containing two neatly wrapped pieces of bread and an apple. Sirius looked away before Remus could catch him counting.

"So have I," James said cheerfully. "Loads, as you can see. You might as well help, or I'll still be eating them when we get there."

Remus accepted one after that. When James began explaining the roof again, he listened closely enough to ask whether the tree moved out of the way once James was up there, which made Sirius choke on his first bite.

Their fourth passenger arrived looking for a toad which wasn't his. He had promised a girl in the next carriage that he would help, and he explained this twice while examining the space beneath their seats. James raised his feet to assist. Sirius watched a round, anxious face emerge from under the bench with dust caught in its hair.

"It might have gone back already," Remus suggested. "You could ask her whether she's found it."

"She'll think I haven't looked properly. She said it was her brother's and he's crying."

James glanced at the open door. "Well, sit here for a bit. If it comes past, you'll see it. That's still helping, isn't it?"

The boy considered this, then accepted a piece of cake and the space beside Sirius. His name was Peter Pettigrew. He dropped a crumb down his front almost at once and spent several minutes brushing at his jumper while pretending he wasn't, until Sirius moved the bag so he could shake it out without anyone having to watch.

The toad eventually appeared inside an older student's shoe. Peter took it back to its owner with a seriousness James found faintly excessive, and returned carrying a chocolate frog the girl had given him. He broke it into four pieces, keeping the smallest before anyone could object.

By the time the talk reached Houses, the compartment had become untidy enough to feel occupied. James wanted Gryffindor. He said it readily, with cake on his knee and no apparent need to check whether anyone approved.

"My whole family's been in Slytherin," Sirius said, folding the edge of his sandwich paper over and over until it began to split.

James drew breath, but Remus spoke first. "Your whole family won't be wearing the Hat, though. Presumably it asks about you."

He said it mildly, then went pink when Sirius looked at him. Peter studied the chocolate on his fingers. Outside the window, a row of back gardens slid past, washing lifting from lines in the wind.

"Exactly," James said. "You can sit with us if you get Gryffindor. We've already got the food sorted out."

Sirius glanced from him to Remus, then back at the paper in his hands. "What if I don't, though?"

"You can still sit here on the way back, can't you? It's a train. I don't think the seats know."

Peter laughed, and Remus relaxed enough to reach for another piece of cake. Sirius looked towards the window at last, but London had gone and there was nothing outside which belonged to his family. He ate the rest of the sandwich before James could offer to exchange it for the mysterious kind.

September 1971 · First Year ·

When the Hat sent Sirius to Gryffindor, he remained on the stool long enough for Professor McGonagall to touch his shoulder.

He had heard it perfectly. That was the difficulty. Across the hall, beneath the green-and-silver banners, Narcissa had turned towards the older girl beside her. She had stopped clapping for the student who had gone before him, her hands resting separately on the table. Sirius got up before he could work out what her expression meant, because if he stayed where he was somebody might decide a mistake had been made.

The Gryffindors made room. An older boy moved a jug, a girl told him which plate was his, and people he had never met congratulated him on something he wasn't certain he had done. Sirius sat with his knees pressed together beneath the table and waited for the next name.

Remus arrived later with his face pale and his lips caught between relief and disbelief. Peter nearly tripped over the bench on his way to join them. By the time James was called, Sirius had begun to feel that the evening might still turn into something he understood.

James came towards them grinning, pointed at the empty place Sirius had kept without meaning to, and squeezed in beside him.

"Told you there'd be room," he said, reaching for a jug as though they had only moved compartments. "Did you see the ceiling? Peter says it's not really outside, but I can't work out where the edges are."

Sirius looked up because James had given him something to look at. Above them, stars shone through a darkness much deeper than the school roof should have allowed, and for a little while he forgot to wonder what his mother would say.

Three Days Later · Breakfast in the Great Hall

Her first letter arrived three days later, while James and Peter were arguing about a staircase.

Sirius read it at breakfast. His mother had written his name in full, which was enough to make him sit straighter before he reached the second line. The words were careful, formally spaced and much easier to bear when he imagined them belonging to somebody else's mother. He folded the parchment along its original creases and put it into his pocket before anyone could see his hands shaking.

James was insisting that a staircase couldn't have moved in the night because he would have heard it. Peter, who had taken it in the wrong direction after getting up for water, was becoming red with the effort of explaining that the staircase hadn't moved its actual feet.

Remus had stopped following the argument. He was stirring porridge which no longer required stirring, his eyes lowered to his bowl.

"You can have mine, if you want," James said eventually, pushing his plate towards Sirius. "Toast, I mean. You've been looking at yours for ages, and mine's not burnt underneath."

Sirius turned his piece over. "I like it burnt. It's meant to be like that."

James considered the blackened corner without enthusiasm. "Fair enough. Don't take the good one later and tell me I didn't offer."

He returned to the staircase, Peter began again from the beginning, and Remus quietly moved the butter within Sirius's reach. Nobody asked what the owl had brought. Sirius kept waiting for the question and, when it didn't come, found it easier to lift his knife.

He had expected Gryffindor to feel like triumph. Instead it kept presenting him with little things he didn't know how to do: ask where the towels were kept, borrow ink, admit that he hadn't understood an instruction. At home he could generally guess which answer was wanted. At school, James would tell him he was wrong, argue about it for ten minutes and carry on liking him afterwards.

That took more getting used to than the moving stairs. Sometimes Sirius started an argument simply to make certain it would happen again.

Autumn 1971

Their first proper scheme began because Peter couldn't find his bed, although Sirius preferred to leave that part out when the story was told later.

Peter came upstairs after supper, stopped in the dormitory doorway and looked at the four-poster standing neatly against the opposite wall. His trunk had moved with it. So had his slippers, the photograph beside his bed and the little rug his mother had sent because she worried about cold floors.

"That wasn't over there this morning," he said, still holding the apple he had brought upstairs. "Have they been cleaning or something?"

James lay on his own bed with a book held too high in front of his face. Sirius had made the mistake of watching him, and Peter's expression changed before either of them could say anything convincing.

"You've moved it. Why've you done that?" Peter stepped inside, looking towards the marks its feet had left on the floor, and his attempt to smile made the joke feel suddenly less successful.

"Looks like yours, doesn't it?" Sirius said, pleased with how steadily he could speak. "Have a look at the trunk, if you're not sure."

Peter checked the trunk, then the space beneath the bed. He straightened more slowly than Sirius expected. "It was there because I can see the door from there. I don't like waking up with it behind me."

James lowered the book. By the window, Remus shut the one he had been pretending to read and looked at the narrow gap where Peter's bed had stood.

"You could put it back now," he suggested. "Before somebody comes up and asks what happened to the floor."

"We were going to," James said, sitting up. "Once he'd noticed. It wasn't meant to be horrible, Pete."

Peter's thumb worried at the apple stalk. "I didn't say it was. I'd just rather have it where it was, that's all."

Moving it back took considerably longer than moving it across the room. The charm James had found was excellent at lifting things and less dependable when asked to lower them gently, and Peter had to rescue his slippers twice. On the second attempt Remus took charge of the instructions. Peter measured the space by eye, made them move the headboard another inch and only relaxed once he could sit against his pillows and see the door again.

Afterwards James rubbed his arms and said they needed a better joke. He sounded cross with the bed for having made such a poor one, which was enough to persuade Peter to sit with them rather than draw his curtains.

"Do the suits of armour," Peter suggested, turning the apple in his hands. "They haven't got anybody's things under them, have they? And that one outside Charms looks like it's waiting for something."

Remus glanced up. "Preferably something which can be stopped with the same spell that starts it."

Sirius looked at James, who had already begun searching for the book again. Peter took a determined bite of his apple, his earlier unease easing as they asked him which suit he meant.

The following evening, they discovered that armour could be persuaded to sing. Remembering when to stop proved more difficult.

James intended one suit to bow to Professor Flitwick and perform a single verse. Peter supplied a song he knew from home, Remus checked the words twice, and Sirius changed a line after Remus pointed out that it was an unsuitable thing to sing to a teacher. Sirius also added a second suit because the first looked lonely. He was very proud of this improvement until the second taught a third.

By breakfast there were six, and one had decided that following its audience was the most reliable way to make itself heard.

Sirius met it coming down a staircase behind two terrified first-years. Its visor rose and fell with the tune, its right knee squeaked on every second step, and somewhere inside the breastplate something was keeping an enthusiastic but inaccurate beat.

"Stop singing, will you?" Sirius whispered, pointing his wand. "You've done that bit. You've done the whole thing about forty times."

The suit bowed, straightened and began again from the first line. James arrived behind Sirius, took in the retreating first-years and sat down on a step because laughing had made standing impractical.

Professor McGonagall came round the corner before Sirius could decide whether to hex him or the armour. She waited while the nearest helmet addressed her as a rather unsuitable kind of sweetheart. Then she looked from Sirius's wand to James, whose attempt to stop laughing had left his eyes watering.

"How many suits have you altered, gentlemen?" She held her hand out towards the nearest one without looking at it, keeping Sirius and James firmly under examination.

Sirius heard himself ask what she meant, and regretted it while the words were still leaving his mouth. McGonagall's gaze remained on him until another suit began the second verse from the landing.

"Six, Professor," Peter said from above them. "I think it's six. Unless it's carried on doing it round the other corner."

Remus, standing beside him with all four schoolbags, shut his eyes briefly. James made a small noise which he attempted to disguise as a cough.

Three Evenings of Detention

They spent three evenings polishing every suit in the corridor while Flitwick undid the charm. He called their work inventive in a tone none of them could safely mistake for praise, then explained how little inventiveness was worth when the person using it had neglected to consider the staircase.

Peter polished the same breastplate twice because James kept leaning against it. Remus refused to help them invent a rhyme about McGonagall, then supplied the missing word when they couldn't find one, and Sirius laughed hard enough to lose his grip on the cloth.

On the final evening he looked along the bench where their four bags had been set together. He hadn't thought about the letter in his trunk for nearly an hour. By the time he noticed, Peter was asking him to hold a gauntlet steady and James was trying the rhyme under his breath again, so he went back to polishing before anyone could see him smile.

September 1972 · Second Year ·

Sirius had spent the summer imagining what it would be like to have his brother at Hogwarts. In most versions Regulus arrived without their mother standing beside him, discovered that James was funny rather than dangerous, and stopped looking towards doorways before he said anything interesting.

He knew better than to expect all of that immediately. On the journey back he had nevertheless caught himself planning where Regulus would sit at breakfast, before remembering that his brother might not be sitting at his table at all.

The Hat barely touched his brother's head before the Slytherins began to clap. Regulus got down from the stool with his shoulders held very straight and looked towards Gryffindor once, his eyes moving along the table until they found Sirius. Sirius lifted his hand too late. By then an older boy had called Regulus over, and his brother had turned towards the green-and-silver banners.

James moved the potatoes nearer Sirius when dinner appeared. "You can talk to him afterwards. They can't keep him at the table all year."

"He doesn't want to talk to me," Sirius said, watching Regulus listen to the older boy. "He'd have waved if he did."

James followed his gaze. "Or he's trying not to do anything wrong in front of about a hundred people. You weren't exactly waving both arms about last year."

Sirius took potatoes he didn't want. Across the hall, Regulus adjusted his sleeve and nodded at something he probably hadn't understood. It was horribly like watching himself at a family dinner, and Sirius found that more difficult to bear than any obvious enjoyment would have been.

They quarrelled outside the library a week later. Regulus had a letter in his pocket and wanted to know why Sirius hadn't answered their mother. Sirius had meant to ask whether he had found his classrooms, whether the lake really showed through the dormitory windows and whether he wanted to come outside on Saturday. Hearing their mother's name displaced all three questions.

"Did she tell you to come and find me?" he asked. "Or have you started checking my post yourself?"

Regulus glanced towards two older students coming out of the library. "She didn't send me. I thought you might have forgotten, and then she'd stop asking me about it."

"Then stop sounding like her. You can talk to me in public, you know. Nobody's going to confiscate your tie."

His brother went red. The students passed, and Regulus waited until they were beyond hearing before he answered. "I am talking to you. You're the one making it difficult. I only asked about a letter."

Sirius could still have asked about Saturday. James had a new ball, Peter knew where to get sandwiches and Remus had agreed to come if nobody expected him to play. There was room in that afternoon for a younger brother who didn't yet know where anything was.

Instead Sirius heard himself say, "Go and tell her you've tried, then. That ought to keep everyone happy."

Regulus's fingers closed round the edge of the letter. He had brought it with him, Sirius realised; perhaps he had meant to show him a particular part, or ask whether the same sentence had appeared in Sirius's. For a moment his mouth moved as though he might try again. Then he folded the parchment carefully and put it away.

"I didn't come because she told me to," he said, more quietly this time. He left before Sirius found an answer which wasn't another way of being cruel.

James was by the stairs when Sirius reached him. He listened to the complaint without the expression Sirius wanted, then asked whether Regulus had actually refused the invitation to the lake.

"He would have," Sirius said. "You don't know what he's like when they're not there."

James leaned back against the banister. "You could've let him, though. Then you'd know instead of having to tell me."

Sirius kicked the bottom stair. His toe hurt all the way to the common room, and James had the decency not to mention the limp. That evening Sirius looked for Regulus at dinner and couldn't decide whether finding him would make him feel better.

Winter 1972–1973 · Second Year ·

By the middle of their second year, Sirius knew that Remus had a remarkable number of ill relatives and a poor memory for which ones he had mentioned before.

His mother became unwell in October. An aunt required a visit in November, although Remus had never spoken about her and never spoke about her again. In December somebody was in hospital. He always returned with his bag held close, his skin grey beneath the freckles, and a reason to go upstairs before breakfast had finished.

Sirius had begun watching the calendar by then. He kept that part to himself until James found him copying dates onto the back of a History essay and asked why he was doing sums instead of homework.

"Because I want to know how long it is between them. Look at the days, not just the months." Sirius pushed the parchment towards him. "And look at when he says he doesn't want to come outside. It's always just before."

James took the page to the window. For a while he held it at an angle, as though daylight might reveal an easier explanation, before sitting on the end of Sirius's bed without looking up.

"It could be something else," he said eventually. "There are loads of things which happen every month."

Sirius wanted to ask him to name one. Instead he looked at the dates again, because being right had begun to feel much less satisfying than he expected.

Peter found the line in a book several days later. He brought it upstairs with both thumbs marking the page and his breath coming quickly from the stairs. The book was too large to conceal beneath his jumper properly; one corner had left a red mark against his chin.

"It says they can go to school," he whispered, lowering it onto James's blanket. "It says they can be quite normal the rest of the time, if somebody makes arrangements. Look, there."

"He is normal," James said sharply. "You don't need a book to tell you that."

Peter's face tightened. "I know he is. I'm saying what it says because the bit before made it sound as though he couldn't be, and that's wrong."

James looked down, then moved his hand so Peter could turn the page. Sirius took over reading when neither of them spoke. There were descriptions of injuries which made him want to shut the book, warnings about confinement and an illustration drawn as though the creature had never been a person at all.

He thought of Remus taking an extra roll from dinner, then pretending he had brought it upstairs because he expected to be hungry later. He thought of the way he checked the dormitory curtains before getting undressed. The pale mark beneath his eye had been there on the train, and Sirius couldn't remember ever asking whether it hurt.

They spent the weekend trying to decide how to tell him. James insisted that they had to make it clear they weren't frightened. Peter said announcing that they weren't frightened might sound as though they had been frightened and were attempting to hide it. Sirius practised a sentence while brushing his teeth, found it ridiculous when spoken to his own reflection and decided James ought to begin.

When Remus returned on Monday with a bandage beneath his cuff, Sirius said, "We know about it, Remus," before anyone else had put down their bags.

Remus stopped with one hand on his trunk. The explanation he had been preparing remained on his face for a moment, and then even that disappeared.

James looked furious. Peter lowered his eyes to the floorboards, and Sirius could hear someone downstairs struggling with a window which always stuck in wet weather.

"What do you mean?" Remus asked. "What d'you think you know?" His eyes moved towards the door, and Sirius realised he was checking whether anyone else was close enough to hear.

Sirius couldn't make himself say the word. Reading it between two covers had been different from putting it into their room, where Remus kept his books and slept beside them every night.

James got up slowly. "About the full moon. We've worked it out, and nobody else knows. We haven't told anyone."

Remus sat on the floor so abruptly that Sirius thought his legs had given way. James moved towards him, then stopped when Remus raised a hand.

"Who have you asked?" His voice was thin enough to sound unlike him. "You must have asked somebody, if you know all that. A teacher, or someone in the library—"

"Nobody," Peter said, too quickly, then made himself start again. "I found a book. We didn't take it out in your name or anything. I just found it."

Remus looked at Sirius. That was worse than shouting would have been, because Sirius had expected relief and could see none at all.

"We've been trying to work out how to say it," he admitted. "I didn't mean to just come out with it when you'd only got back."

"Then why did you?" Remus asked, his hand pressed over the bandage as though he could hide it now.

"Because I thought I'd got it sorted in my head, and apparently I hadn't. I'm sorry. That was a stupid way to do it."

Remus pressed his knuckles to his mouth. Sirius couldn't tell whether he wanted to laugh or be sick. James crouched a little way from him and waited without reaching again.

"Are you going to ask me to leave?" Remus said at last. "Only I'd rather you said now, if that's what this is."

Peter looked up so quickly that the back of his head struck the bedpost. He swore, clapped a hand over it and said they weren't asking him to go anywhere, all in the same breath. James sat on the floor despite the dust, and Sirius lowered himself beside the bed because towering over Remus suddenly seemed unbearable.

"We wanted to help," Sirius said. "That's why we were looking things up. Not to get you sent away."

"You can't help with that bit." Remus looked at the three of them in turn. "You can't come with me, and you can't tell someone because you think they'll have a better idea. You have to promise that."

James promised first. Peter followed, still rubbing the back of his head, and Sirius made himself say the words properly instead of arguing that there ought to be something more useful to offer.

They stayed on the floor until Remus told them what the bandage was for. He stopped twice, and once asked to leave the rest until another day. Sirius let him. When Peter fetched water, he brought four cups rather than one, which allowed Remus to take his without being the only person whose hands needed something to do.

That evening James put the book on Sirius's bed. He had folded a scrap of parchment into it to mark a passage about animals, but he didn't open it immediately.

"There's got to be something useful," he said. "Not asking him questions every five minutes. Not making him tell us the awful bits again because we want to know we've understood."

Sirius looked towards Remus's closed curtains. "Then we work it out first. Before we go promising him anything."

The idea took weeks to find and much longer to understand. James made Sirius wait until they could explain what they were attempting without pretending they already knew how to do it. When they finally told Remus, he argued with them for most of an afternoon, then helped Peter locate a paragraph which might stop the first attempt from going wrong.

It was the closest he came to agreeing. Sirius kept the book open long after the others had gone to bed.

Spring 1974 · Third Year ·

By third year, Sirius had become good at finding other people to be angry with. Severus Snape made it particularly easy, because he disliked Sirius already and seldom bothered to conceal it.

Snape knew spells they weren't supposed to know. He could make a classroom disagreement sound like an accusation, and he had begun watching Remus with an interest Sirius hated. He also had a way of taking Lily Evans's attention from James in the middle of a sentence, which James pretended not to mind and minded so visibly that even Peter had stopped mentioning it.

There were other things Sirius understood without examining them. Snape's cuffs were worn, his bag had been repaired more than once and the same two books appeared beneath his arm every day. It was easy to guess what would embarrass him. Sirius had grown up among people who treated knowing somebody's weakness as permission to use it, and at thirteen he could condemn his family at breakfast while borrowing their methods before lunch.

He did not tell himself that part when he charmed Snape's bag to a classroom desk.

James was waiting by the door. The lesson had ended, the room was emptying, and Sirius expected a moment's nuisance: a tug, a few fallen books, a laugh shared on the way to lunch. He lifted his wand beneath the table while Snape was fastening an ink bottle, then put it away before the other boy turned.

Snape pulled at the strap. It held. He glanced towards them, saw James's expression and pulled harder before Sirius had decided whether to let the charm go.

The strap tore beside an old repair. Books struck the floor, followed by the sound of a bottle breaking inside the bag, and a dark patch began spreading through the cloth.

James laughed before he saw the ink. Sirius laughed because James had, and because the noise was already in the room and stopping would have required him to notice what they had done.

Snape dropped to his knees. He didn't look at them again, which somehow made the sight of him gathering the pages more difficult to enjoy. He lifted an exercise book by its dry edge and tried to separate two leaves with the tip of a fingernail.

"What did you do?" Lily asked from the doorway. She had come back carrying the scarf she had forgotten, and her eyes moved from Snape's hands to the bag still fixed against the desk.

"He pulled it," Sirius said. The explanation sounded thin enough that he immediately wanted to say something sharper over it.

Lily crouched beside Snape instead. "Hold that corner up. If it gets underneath, it'll go through the whole thing."

"Leave it, Lily. I can manage." Snape's voice was tight, his face turned away as he eased another page free.

"I can see that. You've only got two hands, though, and there are three books." She held out the least damaged one. "Take this bit before I get it all over my sleeve."

James straightened by the door. "It was only stuck. He didn't need to yank it like that."

Lily looked up without getting to her feet, pushing a loose strand of red hair behind her ear with the only part of her hand which wasn't ink-stained. "What would you have done if somebody stuck yours to a desk?"

"Worked out which spell it was, probably." James glanced at Sirius as though the answer ought to settle something. "It's not as though we set fire to it."

"Before you knew there was a spell?" Lily asked. "Or would you have picked up your own bag because you expected it to come with you?"

James looked towards the desk. Sirius lifted his wand and released the charm, too late to make it helpful. The empty end of the strap fell against the wood.

Snape got up with the wet bag held away from his robes. His knuckles had turned blue-black, and a drop ran from his little finger onto the floor between them. Sirius could see him trying to hold his face still.

"You'll get it back," Snape said. "Both of you. Don't think I won't remember."

Sirius grinned because he didn't know what else to do with his face. "You'll need a new strap first. That one doesn't look much use now."

Lily stood so abruptly that James stepped back. "You're horrible sometimes. Do you actually hear yourselves?"

She didn't wait for an answer. Snape muttered that he didn't need her carrying anything, then let her take two of the books when she ignored him. Sirius watched them leave and looked at James, ready to find the sentence which would turn the afternoon into a joke again.

James was watching ink collect in the cracks between the floorboards. "Didn't think it'd split like that," he said. "I thought he'd just get cross."

"Neither did I." Sirius put his wand away carefully, as though that were the useful thing left to do.

Neither of them went after the bag. By lunch they were talking about something else, and Sirius laughed often enough to persuade himself the matter had passed. Later, opening his own trunk, he found three spare bottles of ink wrapped in paper by somebody at home and shut the lid more firmly than he needed to.

November 1974 · Fourth Year ·

For his fifteenth birthday, Peter gave Sirius a book he had already borrowed and lost. He presented it after supper with both hands, speaking before Sirius had finished unwrapping the paper.

"It's not the same one. I looked for yours all summer and Mum said she'd have seen it if it was in the sitting room, so I got another. This one's got all the pages. I checked the middle as well."

Sirius turned it over. Somebody had pencilled a price inside the cover, then rubbed it away so thoroughly that the paper had become thin. It was a better copy than the lost one, with a spine which opened properly instead of threatening to separate whenever he reached the illustrations.

"You didn't have to buy another," Sirius said, looking at the cover rather than Peter's anxious face. "I'd forgotten you had it."

"I hadn't, though." Peter moved the discarded paper away from a cup. "Is it the right edition? The man said it was, but he didn't seem to know much about it."

Sirius opened it at a familiar page and pushed it towards him. "It's got the stupid drawing I wanted. Look, he's put the elbow on backwards again. It's perfect. Thanks, Pete."

Peter relaxed so visibly that Sirius wished he had begun with that. Across the table, Remus was attempting to cut a cake with a ruler because James had brought the cake from the kitchens and forgotten every object which might make eating it possible.

"You've made that one twice as big," James observed, leaning across to inspect the divisions. "If we're doing quarters, they ought to look roughly like quarters."

"You can have the small one if you're going to carry on," Remus said. "It's difficult to achieve mathematical precision with school equipment and somebody breathing over the icing."

"I'm only pointing it out. Pete's nearly finished his before you've cut yours." James brushed a crumb from his own knee, which made the complaint considerably less convincing.

Peter tried to deny this with his mouth full, failed, and laughed into his sleeve. Sirius took the ruler from Remus, broke the remaining cake with his hands and gave James the piece most likely to fall apart.

"There you are. Identical, if you don't look very closely." Sirius caught a falling lump of icing with his thumb and transferred it to James's plate before he could object.

Remus examined the icing on his fingers. "Lovely. Exactly how I hoped to spend an evening: eating cake off a ruler somebody's used to draw a map of the drains."

They spent the rest of the evening on the map, once Peter had fetched a damp cloth and James had stopped trying to rescue fallen crumbs from the parchment.

It wasn't much of a map yet. A staircase stood at the wrong angle, one corridor repeatedly ended in a cupboard and the small moving dots James had been so proud of joined together whenever two people stood too close. At one point three dots followed a suit of armour instead of its occupants, which led to an argument about whether the charm was identifying movement or merely being impressed by it.

Peter had found a passage behind a tapestry by following a prefect who hadn't wanted to be followed. James didn't believe him until Peter described the broken suit of armour at the far end and the draught which came through the wall beside it.

"Why didn't you just show us?" James asked, moving the ruler. "We went all round that bit last week."

Peter looked down at the parchment. "Because you said you knew it already. You said there wasn't anything else down there."

James opened his mouth, then shut it and passed him the quill. "Show us now, then. Before I get another bit wrong."

Peter bent over the table. His handwriting was much smaller than theirs and considerably neater than James's, although Sirius had enough sense not to announce that while James was already watching someone improve his work. Remus leaned nearer to compare the route with the existing stairs, and Peter explained it again with growing confidence.

"That gets us round the prefects," Sirius said. "We should've found it ages ago."

"Some of us might be prefects next year," Remus pointed out, adding a mark beside the entrance. "It would be useful to know what we'd be expected to stop."

James looked at him in genuine alarm. "Don't say that. They'll hear you and think you've volunteered."

Remus smiled into his tea. Beneath the table Sirius nudged his foot, and Remus nudged back without looking up, leaving his shoe against Sirius's for the time it took Peter to finish drawing the passage.

It was nearly midnight when James remembered his own present. He fished a photograph from between two books, flattened a corner against his sleeve and held it out with an apology for having sat on it earlier.

His father had taken it beside the lake. Peter was blurred because he had moved; Remus was avoiding a hand James kept putting into his hair. Sirius stood at the edge, halfway through laughing at something he could no longer remember. In the photograph, his younger self caught James's wrist and shoved it away from Remus, then laughed again when James immediately tried with the other hand.

"Dad sent it up," James said. "Mum says you can come at Christmas, if you want. We can work out the travelling once you've asked."

Sirius watched the little figures move. "She doesn't have to keep saying that because you asked her."

"I didn't ask her this time. She asked me whether you'd decided." James began stacking the empty plates, concentrating on them with unusual care. "There's a room. She'd rather you used it than have me leave things in it."

Sirius took longer to answer than an ordinary invitation should have required. "I'll ask about it. I can't promise they'll say yes."

James nodded as though Sirius had simply mentioned a timetable. "Good. She'll make enough food for six people either way. You might as well save us eating all of it."

Sirius put the photograph inside Peter's book so it wouldn't bend. He intended to look at it again when the others were asleep, but he took it out three times before they went upstairs, pretending on the third occasion to check that the corner had stayed flat.

Autumn 1975 · Fifth Year ·

They were in fifth year by the time Sirius managed the transformation, and afterwards James described the first attempt as though Sirius had briefly died on the classroom floor.

Sirius remembered it differently. He remembered the room tipping, a terrible confusion where his hands should have been and the smell of dust arriving with such force that the whole place seemed made of it. The boards beneath him had carried hundreds of shoes. Somebody had spilled something sweet under the teacher's desk months earlier. Behind the wall, a mouse was moving, each small scrape sharper than any noise ought to have been.

James knelt beside him, saying his name too loudly. Sirius tried to tell him to stop and produced a bark which frightened them both.

James fell backwards onto his elbows. For several seconds neither moved. Sirius could hear James's breathing, his clothes shifting and his heart beating astonishingly fast, enough to make Sirius want to get up and stand between him and whatever had caused it.

"You did it," James whispered. "Sirius, you actually did it. Can you understand me?"

Sirius attempted to nod. Four legs required more thought than two, and the back pair had developed an independent opinion about turning. He collided with a chair, sent it over and discovered that James was laughing through both hands.

Sirius growled at him. The sound rose from somewhere much larger than his usual voice, which only made James's shoulders shake harder.

"I'm not laughing at you," James managed. "It's the chair. You looked so pleased with yourself and then you just walked straight into it."

Changing back was worse. Sirius ended up sitting on the floor with his shirt twisted round his middle and James gripping his shoulders as though he expected the rest of him to come loose.

"Don't do it again yet," James said, no longer laughing. "Your face went all wrong halfway through. I couldn't tell whether you'd got stuck."

"I know what happened to my face, James. I was in it." Sirius tried to stand, discovered that his knees hadn't finished settling and sat down again. "Give me a minute before you start explaining how awful I looked."

James laughed then, more shakily than before, and Sirius joined him because the alternative was admitting how frightened he had been when the room changed shape. They sat against the wall with the fallen chair between them until the sounds in Sirius's head became ordinary again.

"Remus is going to be so pleased," James said eventually. "Once he's finished telling us we're both completely mad."

Sirius could already see it: the disbelief, the objections, the moment when Remus understood he needn't spend every full moon alone. For weeks that imagined expression made the rest of the work easier.

The Following Weeks · Three Animagi

It did not make it quick. James's first successful transformation left him unable to work out how to fit his antlers through a doorway, while Peter lost an entire afternoon beneath a cupboard and refused to let either of them describe it afterwards. Remus helped move the cupboard, checked Peter's hands when he changed back and only then asked whether they had considered learning somewhere with fewer things to get trapped under.

"We considered lots of places," James said, still breathless from shifting furniture. "Unfortunately none of them came with a sign saying which one of us was going to become smallest."

Peter rubbed dust from his face. "You might have looked before you put your foot down, though. I could see the whole sole coming towards me."

James's amusement disappeared at once. They moved the desks after that and established rules which Remus insisted on hearing twice. Peter was the one who wrote them down, including a firmly underlined instruction about shoes.

Late Autumn 1975 · Fifth Year ·

The first night they spent with Remus was nothing like the adventures Sirius had invented while they were learning.

There was the waiting beforehand, while Remus tried to sound cross instead of terrified. He kept asking how they would leave if something went wrong, whether Peter could reach the knot on the tree and what James intended to do if the passage was too narrow for him. James answered every question. Sirius grew impatient with the questions he had answered already, then saw the way Remus was holding his bag and made himself begin again.

"You're not to stay human once you're near me," Remus said. "Not because you think you've got time. Not because I look as though I know you. You change before you go in."

Peter nodded, his face unusually serious. "And if I can't change back afterwards, I stay out of the way until you lot can help. We've written that down as well."

Remus looked at him, then at James. "This isn't an exam. You don't get to try the difficult bit and hope somebody gives you marks for getting close."

"We know what you're asking," James said. "We'll do it properly. And we'll wait until Madam Pomfrey's gone before we go anywhere near the tree."

Sirius nearly added that Remus needn't worry. He stopped because Remus had every reason to worry, and pretending otherwise would only have made James's promise sound less reliable.

Even with the plan, something was forgotten. Peter had left the water flask beneath his bed. James went back for it while Sirius watched the lowering sun through a narrow window and wished he could make his confidence feel less borrowed. He had wanted to give Remus something wonderful, and for the first time he understood that Remus would be the person left living with it if wonderful proved to have been a mistake.

Later there was the wolf, and the things Sirius remembered came without much language attached.

Old timber. Claws against the floor. The heavy body turning towards him, too quickly for thought, and his own instinct to keep moving. James stood between the wolf and the wall, larger than Sirius had ever properly understood while watching him practise. Peter remained where he could be safe, a small movement behind a broken board whenever Sirius looked for him.

For one awful moment the wolf fixed on the place where he was hiding. Sirius sprang towards it before deciding to, barking hard enough to hurt his throat, and the attention shifted.

That was the first useful thing. There were others: the wolf could be distracted, could be drawn away from the places where it had begun hurting itself, could be occupied until another stretch of the night had passed. It was exhausting and frightening and, once, so absurd that Sirius would have laughed if he still had a mouth capable of doing it.

By morning Remus had a split lip and a torn sleeve, but less damage than he usually brought back. James fetched the blanket, Peter found the water and Sirius sat on the floor because the single usable chair had already defeated James. He was asleep in it with his head tipped back before Peter finished unscrewing the flask.

Remus watched them from beneath the blanket. "You didn't have to do all that," he said. "You know you didn't, don't you?"

Sirius rubbed his aching neck. "We've spent years learning. Bit late to tell us it wasn't on the timetable."

Remus made a small sound which might have become a laugh if his lip hadn't hurt. Sirius reached for the water before remembering Peter was bringing it, then stopped with his hand halfway towards the table.

Remus caught his wrist. His fingers were cool, the grip lighter than Sirius expected after the strength of the creature which had occupied the room.

"Thank you for coming," he said. "I don't know how I'm meant to say that without making it sound smaller than it is."

Sirius looked down at the hand, then up at him. He wanted a joke badly enough to feel one forming, but Remus was too tired to protect the moment if Sirius spoiled it.

"You can tell us whether we got in your way after you've slept," he said. "For now, move over a bit. This floor's murder."

Remus let him rest his arms beside the blanket. He didn't let go immediately, and Sirius stayed still until his eyes closed.

They argued about the names several days later, when exhaustion had become something they could talk about rather than simply endure. James thought a stag deserved something rather grander than the suggestions Sirius kept producing. Peter objected to one which referred to the cupboard and accepted Wormtail only after Remus pointed out that it described something useful rather than something he had done wrong.

"Padfoot," James said, dropping his voice as two students passed their table. "Because you keep appearing behind people without them hearing you. Except when you knock all the furniture over."

Sirius considered protesting, then decided he liked it. Remus looked down when the conversation reached him, worrying at a loose thread beside his cuff.

"You needn't have one," Sirius said. "If you think it's stupid. We can just keep using your actual name like terribly ordinary people."

"Moony's all right," Remus replied after a moment. "If that's what you meant. I'd rather hear it from you lot than spend the whole time wondering whether somebody else has noticed."

James wrote the four names along the edge of their rough map. His letters were too large and Peter made him do them again, but Sirius kept watching Remus glance at the parchment as though something had been returned to him which he hadn't known he was allowed to keep.

Winter 1976 · Fifth Year ·

That winter, Sirius nearly destroyed what they had spent years building. Afterwards he remembered the conversation outside the greenhouses in details which refused to arrange themselves into anything useful: frost on the wall, mud on Snape's shoes and a loose fastening on his own bag which he kept trying to close with one hand. He couldn't remember whether the letter from home had arrived that morning or the day before. He knew he had been in a temper before Snape spoke, and that none of the things which caused it had been Snape's responsibility.

"He goes somewhere every month," Snape said, stopping just beyond the doorway. "You can't all think nobody's noticed."

Sirius tugged the fastening shut. "Perhaps he wants an evening without you following him. Most people would."

"Then why does he always come back hurt? Does he fall down the same staircase every few weeks?"

Sirius looked up. He could have walked away. The entrance hall wasn't far, James was waiting inside, and for once he had no audience whose laughter he might lose by refusing to perform.

Instead he told Snape how to stop the tree, the explanation taking seconds which he would spend much longer trying to account for. He expected Snape to hesitate, to want proof, to discover that there were things he didn't dare do despite all his questions. He imagined the branches, the darkness and Snape standing outside with the information he had been so eager to obtain, afraid to use it. The picture satisfied him so completely that he failed to follow it any farther.

Snape looked towards the grounds, then back at him. "And that's supposed to frighten me off, is it?"

"I haven't told you to do anything," Sirius said, already enjoying the way the answer let him pretend he hadn't chosen what came next. "You're the one who keeps asking."

James found out after supper. Sirius was halfway up the dormitory stairs when he heard his name, spoken without any of the impatience James usually used to make an ordinary question sound urgent.

"What did you tell Snape about the Willow?" James asked. He had come up several steps, his hand still on the banister. "Peter heard him talking. What did you say?"

Sirius stopped, annoyed first by the tone and then by the fact that Peter had brought it to him. "Nothing he wasn't already trying to work out. He keeps nosing round, and I thought if he wanted to know so badly—"

"Tell me exactly what you said." James's voice rose enough for someone below to look up. "Sirius, where does he think he's going?"

Sirius answered. James stared at him for one horrible moment, and the expression on his face carried Sirius past the end of the picture he had allowed himself outside the greenhouses.

James ran before Sirius could find anything else to say, and Sirius followed, reaching the entrance hall with his breath tearing at his throat and the growing knowledge that being quick now could not make his earlier words less deliberate. A teacher stopped him at the doors. He tried to push past, tried to explain without saying the thing he had already said to someone who hated them, and wasted seconds while James was outside and Snape was somewhere Sirius couldn't see.

By the time they let him through to the corridor again, there was nothing left for him to do but wait.

They brought James back with blood on his sleeve. Not much, but enough that Sirius couldn't look anywhere else while McGonagall took him towards the stairs. His glasses were crooked. Dirt marked one knee, and when Sirius said his name James looked straight past him.

Snape walked behind, white-faced and shaking, refusing the hand offered at his elbow. He stopped when he saw Sirius.

"You knew what was down there." His voice cracked on the last word. "You knew, and you told me how to get in."

Sirius couldn't answer. Snape's hand moved towards his wand, and McGonagall stepped between them before either boy could do something else which could never properly be undone.

"You will both come with me," she said. Her face when she looked at Sirius made him feel younger than he had on the train.

He spent most of the night in the headmaster's office. There were questions he could answer: where he had been, what he had said, whether Remus knew. He answered that last one too loudly, then again more quietly when Professor Dumbledore asked him to be precise.

There was one question he couldn't make himself answer properly. What had he believed would happen if Severus reached the end of the passage?

Sirius began by saying he hadn't thought Snape would go. He heard how useless that sounded and tried to explain the tree, the darkness, the way Snape always wanted to know something he could use against them. Each explanation left the same fact behind: he had told another boy how to reach Remus during a full moon and then gone upstairs expecting to sleep.

At one point McGonagall asked him to stop discussing whether Snape should have been curious. Sirius looked at the floor and finally did.

The Following Afternoon · The Hospital Wing

James wouldn't speak to him afterwards. That frightened him. Remus asking to see him was worse.

He arrived in the hospital wing the following afternoon with a book he had barely looked at before taking it from the shelf. Arriving empty-handed had seemed unbearable, and bringing something had allowed him to pretend he knew how to begin.

Remus lay against two pillows with a cut near his hairline and fresh bandages beneath his sleeves. He looked at the book, then at the chair Sirius had pulled close to the bed.

"Put that down, will you? I don't want anything at the moment." Remus moved his hand away from the edge of the blanket before Sirius could put the book within reach.

Sirius set it on the table and sat with a chair's width between his knees and the mattress. "I didn't think he'd actually go. I know that doesn't help, but I didn't think—"

"You told him how to get in." Remus's hands were flat on the blanket. He had been holding them that way since Sirius arrived. "That's the bit you did think about. You knew enough to tell him exactly where to put his hand."

Sirius swallowed. "I know what I said. I wish I hadn't, but I know."

"Then let me finish. Please, Sirius. Don't keep saying you know before I've said it."

Sirius shut his mouth. Down the ward, somebody turned a page, and the small ordinary sound made him horribly aware that other people were having an afternoon in which this hadn't happened.

"If James hadn't got there, I could have killed him," Remus said. "I wouldn't even have known who he was. I'd have woken up and they'd have had to tell me."

He stopped. His fingers pressed into the blanket until the knuckles paled, then slowly released it.

"My dad would have come," he went on, looking beyond Sirius at the end of the bed. "They'd have sent for him, wouldn't they? I keep thinking about somebody having to write the letter. And Snape's parents. They'd have had to tell his parents what happened, and I wouldn't have remembered doing it."

Sirius looked at the book on the table. Its bright cover was turned towards Remus, an invitation to an ordinary evening neither of them was going to have.

"I didn't want you to hurt anybody," he said, and knew at once that wanting had never been the part which mattered.

Remus turned towards him. "It was mine. The one thing I asked you not to tell people. You knew how frightened I was when you found out, and then you used it because you were cross with him."

There was no anger in Sirius sharp enough to protect him from that. "I'm sorry, Remus. I haven't got anything else which doesn't sound like I'm trying to get out of it."

Remus looked towards the window. For a while Sirius thought he wouldn't answer, and he made himself remain still rather than fill the silence because he couldn't bear it.

"I don't know what to do with that yet," Remus said. "I'd like you to go now. I need to sleep, and I can't with you sitting there waiting for me to make it all right."

Sirius left the book until Remus asked him to take it. He carried it back to the dormitory without opening it.

It took weeks before their room began sounding like itself again. Peter talked about lessons, meals and anything which might give the four of them somewhere to begin. James answered him, then went quiet when Sirius joined in. Remus accepted notes he had missed and thanked whoever brought them, but he drew his curtains earlier and no longer left his wrist within easy reach across the table.

One evening Sirius found Peter moving chairs nearer the common-room fire. He had put four cups on a small table and was pretending they had happened to end up together.

"You don't have to keep doing that," Sirius said. "Trying to get everyone to sit down and stop being cross."

Peter lowered himself onto the arm of a chair. "I don't like it like this. Nobody says anything, and then if I do I feel as though I've picked the wrong thing."

"Neither do I," Sirius said, more sharply than he intended. "It's not exactly pleasant for me either."

Peter's ears reddened. He looked towards the stairs, then made himself look back. "You did it, though. We didn't know you were going to, and Remus didn't get to choose any of it."

Sirius stared at him. Peter held his gaze for an uncertain second, then looked down at the cups without taking the words back.

"I know I did," Sirius said at last. He sat in the chair farthest from the fire and helped Peter move the table when it began to wobble.

That evening no one forgave him. James came down for a book, Remus stayed upstairs and Peter eventually took two untouched cups back to the kitchen. Sirius remained by the fire after the room emptied, because learning to endure the space he had made was the only useful thing anyone had asked him to do.

Summer 1976 · Between Fifth and Sixth Year ·

Sirius left home with a bag that wouldn't shut, having packed too quickly to discover the problem while he could still do anything about it. He had pushed clothes inside without folding them and added things he might never use because leaving them felt like agreeing to come back. Halfway down the stairs he found a sleeve trapped between the fastenings. When he pulled, the bag opened and dropped Peter's book onto the landing.

His mother was still speaking in the drawing room. He could hear his own name, James's and something about gratitude. He had stopped answering several minutes earlier, which hadn't stopped the argument; his father had gone quiet in the way which meant he considered the matter settled.

Sirius crouched to collect the book. The photograph slipped partway from between its pages, and he pressed it back before anyone could see what he had brought.

Regulus stood at the bottom of the stairs in his dressing gown. His hair was flattened on one side, one slipper wasn't properly on, and for a moment he looked like the little boy who used to come into Sirius's room certain there was something with teeth in the passage.

"Where are you going?" Regulus asked. His eyes moved from the bag to the drawing-room door. "It's nearly midnight."

"I'd noticed the time, thanks." Sirius pushed the book between two shirts. "Go back upstairs. You don't need to stand there."

Regulus stayed where he was. "She'll calm down if you leave it alone. She did last time."

Sirius pulled the strap over his shoulder so hard that it caught his hair. "Then you can tell her where I've gone when she does."

"I don't know where you've gone," Regulus said. "That's why I'm asking." He looked back at Sirius, his voice lowered to keep it from carrying through the drawing-room door.

"No, you don't." Sirius took the remaining stairs before he had to watch his brother understand that he had meant it to hurt.

At the bottom, Regulus moved aside and then seemed to regret it. His hand lifted towards Sirius's bag without quite touching it.

"You could wait until morning. You don't have to do everything while you're still angry."

Sirius put his hand on the latch. If he waited until morning there would be another conversation, another set of things he had agreed not to do and another letter he would have to write carefully because somebody might read it before the owl left. James had said there was a room. Sirius had never needed those words to mean so much before.

"I can't stay tonight," he said, more quietly. "I just can't. Go back to bed, Reg."

His brother looked as though he might ask to come, or ask Sirius to stay, or tell him something neither would know what to do with afterwards. Sirius closed the door before he could find out.

By the time he reached the Potters' house, his anger had worn down into a cold, embarrassed certainty that he ought to have sent a message first. There were no lights at the front. The garden was still, the gate damp beneath his hand, and he stood outside holding the bag together while considering whether there might be somewhere to wait until breakfast.

He was beginning to decide that a bench would do when an upstairs window opened.

"Sirius? Is that you down there?" James sounded asleep, his face a pale blur above the climbing plant beside the window.

Sirius looked up. All the things he had rehearsed on the way became impossible to say across a garden. "Can you let me in? Only for a minute, if everyone's asleep."

James disappeared. There was a thump, another voice and then the front door opened so quickly that it struck the wall. James came down the path without shoes, pulling a jumper over the shirt he had slept in.

"What's happened? Are you hurt?" He looked Sirius over before Sirius could decide whether to be annoyed by it. "You've got blood on your hand."

Sirius looked at the little cut where the fastening had caught him. "It's the bag. Nothing's happened like that. I've just—can I stay? For a bit, until I sort something out?"

"Of course you can. Give us that before it comes apart." James reached for the bag, already turning towards the house with the practical certainty of someone who couldn't see why the answer needed considering.

The bag opened in James's hands, spilling a shirt and two socks onto the path. Sirius nearly laughed, because after everything he had managed to carry away he still couldn't get it through a gate. James crouched, pushed the clothes back in and held the whole thing against his chest without comment.

Mrs Potter stood in the doorway tying the belt of her dressing gown. She looked at Sirius, then at James's bare feet, and moved aside.

"Come in, dear. Both of you, before you catch cold. James, mind the step with that bag."

Sirius tried to explain in the kitchen. He got as far as saying his mother hadn't thrown him out before Mr Potter set a cup in front of him and sat at the other end of the table, giving him room to look somewhere else.

"You needn't settle every detail tonight," he said. "You'll tell us what you want to tell us when you've had some sleep."

"I wasn't asking you to have an argument with them. I can go somewhere else once it's light." Sirius put his hands round the cup without drinking. "I should have written first."

Mrs Potter paused beside his chair. "You asked whether you could stay, Sirius. The answer is yes. Drink that while it's warm, and I'll see whether James has left you any clean bedding."

James protested that the room was tidy. His mother looked towards the ceiling with an expression Sirius had seen often enough to recognise, and James changed the claim to nearly tidy before she could answer.

Mr Potter pushed a plate between them. James took a biscuit, broke it over the table and began talking about the cupboard where the spare blankets were kept. Nobody asked whether Sirius had said anything he ought to apologise for before arriving. Nobody suggested that a sufficiently detailed account might alter the invitation.

Later James helped him put his clothes into a drawer which was already empty. There was dust along the bottom, a folded towel on the pillow and a book James had obviously abandoned halfway through reading. Sirius couldn't stop noticing the ordinary signs that the room had existed before he needed it.

"Mum kept telling me to stop leaving things in here," James said, lifting the book. "Suppose she was right. Don't tell her I said that, though."

Sirius remained beside the bed. "What if they write to your dad? They'll say I haven't told you everything."

James shut the drawer and looked at him properly. "Then he'll write back. You're staying. They've said you can."

"You don't know what she'll put in it." Sirius hated how young he sounded and couldn't make himself stop. "She won't just say she's cross."

"Dad knows how letters work," James replied, less flippantly than the words might have sounded from anyone else. "You don't have to read it before he does and tell us which bits to believe."

Sirius sat. The mattress gave beneath him, and he realised he had expected somebody to take the room away again ever since the gate opened.

James sat beside him, shoulder resting against his. The silence was different from the one they had endured after the Willow. Nobody was withholding anything in it; neither of them was waiting for the other to say he had learned his lesson. They listened to Mrs Potter moving about in the next room until Sirius could breathe without doing it carefully.

"You can tell me tomorrow," James said. "Or the day after. I don't mind as long as you stop looking as though you're about to ask permission to use the pillow."

Sirius laughed despite himself. He put the towel away, found something to sleep in and listened while James explained breakfast as though it were a school timetable which could not reasonably be expected to stay fixed.

When James had gone, Sirius lay down without drawing the curtains. He could hear a tap being turned off, somebody coughing and the soft complaint of a floorboard in the passage. Nothing in the house required him to stay awake and interpret it.

He left his bag open at the foot of the bed. In the morning, it was still there, and the first voice he heard was Mrs Potter calling upstairs to ask whether either of them intended to eat before lunch.

Autumn 1976 · Sixth Year ·

James did not become a different person simply because he was kind to Sirius. There were still hexes in corridors and afternoons when being bored became a reason to make somebody else's day worse. Sirius enjoyed most of them, and sometimes joined in before he knew what had begun the quarrel.

That autumn James sent Snape's notes flying across a courtyard. It happened after Snape muttered something Sirius didn't catch. James heard enough to turn, a wand moved, and parchment burst from beneath Snape's arm before scattering over the wet stones.

Two pages landed in a puddle near the steps. Students laughed, and Sirius began to say something which would have brought another laugh before he saw Lily on the far side of the courtyard.

She wasn't looking at James. She was watching the pages loosen in the water, her face set in a way Sirius had seen more often since the end of the previous year. She and Snape no longer sat together. That hadn't made her willing to enjoy the sight of his work being ruined.

James saw her too. "He started it, Evans. You didn't hear what he said."

"Then finish it," she replied. "You've got your wand out already. You could manage picking up a piece of paper."

She walked past into the castle. Snape had retrieved the nearest sheets and aimed a curse from beside the steps. It caught James's sleeve, scorching a line through the fabric before a teacher arrived to separate them, and the crowd found another reason to make a noise.

That Evening · The Dormitory

That evening James sat on the dormitory floor trying to repair the damage. He had taken the sleeve apart farther than the curse had, and every attempt to mend it produced a small, unconvincing pucker.

"Could've hit my hand," he said, holding the cloth to the light. "A bit lower and it would've gone straight through."

Sirius looked at the blackened edge. "You got his work wet. He was hardly going to thank you."

"I know what I did." The sharpness made Sirius look up. James put down his wand and dragged a hand through his hair, leaving it worse than before. "I'm not saying I didn't start the hexing. I know I did."

Peter sat cross-legged on his bed, watching the sleeve. "Why did you, then? You'd already walked past him."

James opened his mouth. Sirius knew several answers he could offer on his behalf, all familiar enough to say without thinking. Snape was always at it. Somebody had to shut him up. It wasn't as though he never did anything back.

James used none of them. "He said something about my dad," he said eventually, turning the sleeve inside out.

"What sort of thing?" Sirius asked, anger arriving readily on his friend's behalf. "If he thinks he can—"

"It doesn't matter what sort. It wasn't the first time I'd thought of doing that to him, was it?" James stared at the stitching. "I had it ready. I was waiting for him to give me a reason."

Remus closed his book. The prefect badge lay beside it, where he had put it after rounds, and Sirius found himself looking at that rather than at either of their faces.

"You could try leaving one," Remus said at last. "A reason, I mean. You don't have to pick all of them up."

James made an irritated sound. "I know that. It's considerably less obvious when he's standing there saying it."

"Then practise when he's not there," Peter suggested. He went pink when they looked at him. "I'm only saying. You keep telling me that's how to learn anything."

James looked down, then gave a reluctant laugh. "Fine. You can all watch me become incredibly sensible. It'll be terribly dull, and you'll wish you'd never asked."

He began leaving some quarrels alone after that. Not all of them, and never with much grace. Once he spent an entire walk from Herbology explaining what he could have said, until Remus told him that hearing every unused insult was scarcely an improvement for the people walking beside him.

Sirius laughed, then noticed that James was already laughing too. He missed having his friend join in every time he started something, and resented the change more than he liked to admit. On the next occasion he reached for his wand, James said his name quietly, and Sirius found that being known could be inconvenient as well as comforting.

Autumn 1977 · Seventh Year · A Place at the Table

By seventh year, Lily had started sitting with them in the library. The first time, Sirius assumed somebody else had taken her usual seat. The second time she brought a spare book because James had forgotten his, and by the fourth James was arriving early enough to claim the chair beside him.

That was how Sirius discovered he could be jealous of a chair. He stopped beside the table with three books under his arm and watched Lily arrange her parchment where he generally put his own. She had already moved James's ink away from his elbow, which was sensible and therefore particularly irritating.

"You can sit opposite," James whispered, looking up. "Pete's only gone to get something. He's not using all that space."

"I usually sit there," Sirius said, and heard how childish it sounded before Lily had time to react.

She glanced from him to James. "Do you want me to move? I didn't know there were allocated places. Nobody gave me the chart."

"I haven't got a chart. I've just got to get another book." Sirius adjusted the three he was already carrying and went back towards the shelves before either could point them out.

He spent ten minutes looking for a volume he didn't need. From the end of the aisle he could see James leaning towards Lily's parchment, hear her saying he would have to work out the last part himself. Sirius knew James had spent years trying to make her speak to him that way, comfortably and without looking for the nearest reason to leave. He wanted James to have it. He simply hadn't understood how much of an ordinary afternoon it might occupy.

When he returned, Lily had put her bag on the floor and cleared James's things from the chair on his other side.

"You can have this one," she said, moving a loose sheet out of the way. "He's spread himself over half the library, so I've reduced his territory."

James protested without looking up. Lily nudged his ink farther from the edge, and Sirius sat before anybody could make an occasion of it.

For a while he listened to them disagree about James's essay. James had written a conclusion he couldn't explain. Lily made him read it aloud, then waited while he went back to the first paragraph to discover what he had originally meant.

"It sounded quite good when I put it down," he whispered. "I thought you'd appreciate the effort."

"It sounds good now. It just doesn't say anything." Lily tapped a line with the blunt end of her quill. "You can't put therefore at the beginning and hope the rest sorts itself out."

Sirius laughed. James kicked his ankle beneath the table, and Lily looked pleased enough that Sirius included her in the next joke without deciding to. Peter returned with the book everyone had actually needed and refused to lend it to James until he removed a damp cup from the cover.

For half an hour the table felt ordinary. Then Lily went to fetch another reference, and James leaned across the place she had left.

"You all right?" he asked. "You've been funny about this for weeks." He moved his quill out of Sirius's way, making room between their books for an answer.

"I'm always funny. It's one of my better qualities." Sirius looked down at the page he hadn't read and waited for James to accept the answer.

James didn't smile. Sirius turned the page, found he had gone backwards and put it down again.

"You could've told me it was going to be all the time," he said. "I knew you liked her. I didn't know I'd have to book a place three days in advance to talk to you."

James's expression changed. He glanced towards Peter, who had become deeply interested in finding an index entry, then lowered his voice further.

"You're still my best mate. You know that, don't you?" James kept his voice quiet, his attention fixed on Sirius rather than the aisle where Lily had disappeared.

Sirius shrugged, which was the nearest he could get to an answer without admitting how badly he had needed the sentence. James stayed where he was, waiting, and Sirius finally said he knew.

"Then you don't have to like every bit of it," James replied. "Just don't make her think she isn't wanted. She's trying with us, and you keep looking as though she's nicked something."

Sirius glanced towards the shelves. Lily stood on tiptoe, reaching for a volume which had apparently been put away by somebody considerably taller. He pushed his chair back before James could notice.

Lily accepted the book, brushed dust from its edge and looked at him. "Thank you. I was about to climb, and I've a feeling Madam Pince would have taken that personally."

"You could've asked James. He likes being useful when somebody's watching." Sirius leaned against the end of the shelf, turning the book so she could see whether it was the right one.

"He'd have climbed first and asked what I wanted afterwards. Then we'd have had to explain the shelves."

Sirius laughed so loudly that Madam Pince appeared at the end of the aisle. Lily pressed the book against her mouth, her shoulders shaking, and for the first time he understood how much James might recognise in her company.

On the way back to the table she asked whether the notes James had promised to lend her genuinely existed. Sirius told her which pocket to check and warned her that the last page might contain a drawing instead. She thanked him gravely, sat down and asked James for the drawing first.

James looked betrayed. Sirius put his own books between them and began, finally, to work.

June 1978 · Seventh Year ·

They made one last proper attempt at the armour before leaving school. Remus said it was a terrible idea, then checked the charm James had written out and made him change the part which would have allowed it to spread beyond the entrance hall.

"One suit," he said, drawing a firm line beneath the revised instruction. "I don't care how lonely Sirius thinks it looks. Nobody's teaching anything to the rest."

Peter kept watch on the stairs while Sirius climbed onto a bench with his wand between his teeth. After seven years at Hogwarts he might have found a more dignified way to do it, but the bench gave him a clear view of the hinges and James was already making disapproving noises below.

"You could cast from down here," James whispered. "It's a charm, not something you've got to pour into its ear."

Sirius took the wand from his mouth. "I want to see where it's going. Stop explaining and do your bit."

They had agreed on a simple bow when McGonagall passed on her way to breakfast. One movement, one suit, no song. Remus had been particularly firm about the singing, and Peter had pointed out that they didn't have three evenings left to spend polishing an entire corridor.

The armour shifted beneath Sirius's wand. For a moment it looked promising. Then Peter whispered that somebody was coming, and James wasted the next two seconds asking how he knew when the person was still round the corner.

Footsteps sounded on the landing. Sirius climbed down so quickly that he trapped his robe beneath one shoe and pitched forwards into James, who caught him while laughing too hard to do anything else useful. Remus snatched up the parchment. Peter turned towards the noticeboard with an interest so intense that Sirius knew they were finished before McGonagall appeared.

She stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked at the four of them. Sirius could almost see her checking their positions against a memory she had been hoping not to revisit.

"An early start, gentlemen. I trust there is a reason for it." McGonagall let the silence continue while James abandoned the last unsuccessful attempt to free his sleeve unobtrusively.

"Revision, Professor," James said, disentangling himself from Sirius's sleeve. "We thought we'd do some practical work while it was quiet."

McGonagall looked at Sirius's wand. Behind her, the suit of armour began to bow.

Its helmet fell off, struck the floor and rolled down two steps before coming to rest against her shoe. The headless suit remained bent at the waist, evidently uncertain whether it had completed its task. Peter made a strangled sound which Sirius knew was laughter only because he had heard it often enough over seven years.

McGonagall picked up the helmet and held it beneath one arm. She looked at James over its empty neck, then at the folded parchment in Remus's hand.

"The polishing cloths are where you left them. I imagine the route will still be familiar."

James nodded with an effort at dignity. "After breakfast, Professor? Only we've been up rather a long time."

"After breakfast, Mr Potter. I would prefer you fed before you attempt anything else."

She turned away, carrying the helmet. Sirius could have sworn the corner of her mouth moved, but he had acquired enough sense during his education not to ask. When she was gone, Peter sat on the bench and laughed until they had to warn him that she could still come back.

June 1978 · Final Term ·

On their final evening, they sat by the lake with the completed map spread across James's knees. Peter kept making the small figures move by walking away and returning, while Remus told him they could see it working without him trampling the edge of the parchment.

It had taken years to make the names remain where they belonged. There were still corners Sirius wanted to improve, bits of lettering which didn't match and a staircase he disliked because James had drawn it while half asleep. Looking at the whole thing was different from finding another fault to correct. For once he could see the hours they had put into it, all the evenings gathered into something which could be folded and carried in a pocket.

"We ought to do the titles again," James said, running a finger along one line. "They're not even the same size."

"Nearly all the bad bits are yours," Sirius replied. "You can spend the summer practising. We'll send you exercises."

Peter returned to the grass, pleased with another successful journey across the map. "Leave it alone. If you start doing it again, we'll find something else that needs changing and never finish."

Remus folded it before the breeze could take a corner. Sirius watched him run his thumb along the crease, careful without making a fuss, and had the sudden unreasonable wish that nothing else they owned would ever need packing.

Lily arrived with a bag of food and an explanation of why none of them was allowed to complain about what she had managed to obtain. James was reaching inside before she finished.

"I wasn't going to complain. I was only seeing whether you'd brought the other sort."

"That's exactly what you said last time." She sat beside him and put the bag between them. "Eat whatever you've picked up. Someone else might want the rest."

Sirius moved his foot so Peter could settle on the dry patch of grass. Remus passed him a sandwich, and for a while they talked about the summer as though arranging it might extend the evening.

James's house first. Sirius's flat once he found one, assuming he could persuade anyone that he would remember to pay for water. Peter said his mother expected them to visit and had already begun worrying about whether they would eat on the train home. Lily wanted time with her own parents before work and everything else began.

Remus said he would write once he knew what he was doing. He said it lightly enough that James nearly answered in the same tone, then looked at him and asked whether he would come to the Potters' first, before he worried about the rest.

"A few days," Remus agreed. "As long as your mum knows how many people you've invited. I'm not being the one sleeping in the bath."

"We've got floors," James assured him. "Proper ones. Several, in fact. You'll be very comfortable."

Lily threw a crust at him. Peter caught it without looking, then seemed as surprised by his own hand as everyone else, and the talk became an argument about whether it counted if he hadn't meant to do it.

Sirius lay back with his hands beneath his head. He could hear them without looking: Peter trying to defend an achievement he hadn't expected, Lily explaining his point better than he had, James interrupting because he had misunderstood which part they were arguing about. Remus laughed close enough for Sirius to feel the shift of his shoulder through the grass.

The castle windows lit one by one. Somewhere inside were the desks they had scratched, the stairs they had learned to avoid and the hospital bed where Sirius had once sat with a useless book in his hands. There was a place beside the fire which still felt like theirs even when somebody else sat in it, and a dormitory where all four curtains would be taken down once they left.

He would have been glad to stay another week. He wouldn't have admitted it for anything, so when James asked what he was thinking about, Sirius said the food and reached into the bag before Lily could accuse him of being sentimental.

June 1978 · Leaving Hogwarts ·

The map did not leave school with them, although they had spent part of the previous evening arguing about whose luggage would be safest. On the last morning, while Peter tried to fit a rolled blanket into his bag and James explained why it would fit better the other way round, the parchment slipped from between two books onto the corridor floor. Remus had cleared it before putting it away, and it looked like any old sheet carried too long at the bottom of a schoolbag.

Filch reached it before Sirius did. He held it by one corner, squinting at its blank surface as though innocence were merely another charm he hadn't yet learned to remove.

"What's this, then? Something you don't want me looking at?" Filch moved it out of James's reach, evidently finding the sudden attention more interesting than the parchment itself.

"Homework," James said, too quickly. "Old homework. We were going to chuck it away."

Filch lifted it towards the light. Sirius watched the crease open between his fingers and thought of Peter finding the passage, Remus rewriting the instructions and James falling asleep over a page he refused to leave unfinished.

"You'll get grease on it," Sirius said. The words escaped before he could stop them, and Remus made a small sound behind him.

Filch's expression settled into satisfaction. "Very precious for old homework, isn't it? We'll see what the headmaster makes of it."

James began to object. A prefect called from the staircase, Peter dropped the blanket again and somebody behind them asked them to move because there were trunks blocking the landing. A whole departure continued round the argument, giving it less room with every second.

Sirius considered reaching for the parchment. He could probably have taken it, could have made one last stupid mess in a corridor and relied on leaving before the punishment arrived. Then he saw Remus watching his hand and let it fall.

"We'll get it back," he muttered as Filch moved away. "He won't work out how to open it."

James looked after the caretaker, then towards the stairs where Lily was waiting. "We know where everything is anyway. Come on. We can sort it out later."

Sirius followed, telling himself that was true. At the entrance he looked back once, trying to see whether Filch had put it in a pocket or carried it away unfolded, but the corridor was empty and someone had already begun calling for the doors to be kept clear.

Outside, the others were waiting beside their luggage. Peter had finally secured the blanket, badly. Sirius caught the loose end, tucked it beneath a strap and went down the steps with them.

Autumn 1978

The first time Sirius returned from an Order assignment with blood on his clothes, James couldn't get the kitchen drawer open.

It had stuck before. They all knew that. Lily had told him to mend it, James had said he would, and now he pulled at it with such force that the table beside it shook. A spoon rattled against a plate. Sirius watched it move and found the sound oddly difficult to place.

"Top cupboard," he said, holding one hand against his side. "If it's the cloths you want. She's moved them."

"I know where they are." James pulled again, then stopped with the handle in his fist. He looked at it, at Sirius and finally at the cupboard above his head, as though the room had rearranged itself while he wasn't watching.

Lily put a chair behind Sirius's knees. "Sit down before he takes the kitchen apart. Slowly. Let me see what you're holding."

The cut ran along his side. It hadn't seemed particularly bad until warmth began spreading beneath his shirt and lifting his arm made dark spots appear at the edges of the room. Sirius tried to explain that he had already closed part of it, then lost the middle of the sentence when Lily moved the cloth.

She looked up at James. "Clean water, please. And the box from the cupboard. It's the brown one, not the tin."

James obeyed. Sirius noticed how much better he became once somebody gave him something definite to do. He fetched things too quickly, set them down too carefully and stayed within reach of Lily's next instruction, his glasses slipping until he pushed them up with the back of his wrist.

Nobody asked how brave Sirius had been. When he began describing the alley, Lily told him to save the story until she could listen without having to mend him at the same time.

"Hold this here," she said, placing his good hand over the folded cloth. "You don't need to keep watching me. Look at James if you want something to be cross about."

"He's still got half the drawer in his hand," Sirius observed, which made James look down and put the handle on the table.

Lily laughed once, briefly, without lifting her eyes from the dressing. Sirius held the cloth where she had asked and concentrated on the chair beneath him until the room stopped dimming at the corners.

Peter arrived half an hour later with Remus. He brought the coat Sirius had left behind and a loaf of bread, explaining in the doorway that he hadn't known whether anyone would have eaten and the shop was about to close.

They hadn't eaten. James looked at the bread with an expression of relief so plain that Peter stopped apologising before he had finished taking it out of the bag.

"Thanks, Pete. Could you put it there? Lily's going to want us all fed once she's finished threatening him."

"I haven't threatened him yet," Lily said. "I'm leaving myself something to look forward to."

Remus came straight to Sirius's chair. Rain clung to his hair, his coat was still fastened and his eyes went first to the white dressing beneath the open shirt.

"You could've waited for us," he said. "We were coming round the other way. You knew we were."

Sirius shifted and regretted it. "There wasn't time to stand there discussing it. He'd have got away."

"You keep saying that afterwards." Remus looked at the bloodied cloth on the table, then back at him. "There's never time while it's happening, apparently, and then there's plenty while the rest of us are trying to find you."

The anger made Sirius defensive before it made him ashamed. He was sore, tired and frightened in a way he hadn't yet admitted, and being scolded seemed an easier thing to resent than having nearly been unable to get home.

"I'm here, aren't I?" he said. "You can stop looking as though I've done it on purpose."

Remus stepped back. Lily looked at Sirius without speaking, then handed Peter a knife and asked him to cut the bread. James found plates. The small tasks filled the kitchen while Sirius watched Remus unfasten his coat with fingers which weren't quite steady.

Later, when the others had settled in the sitting room, Sirius found him at the kitchen sink. Remus had washed his hands already and seemed to be waiting for the water to give him another reason to remain there.

Sirius stood beside him until he turned off the tap. "I shouldn't have said it like that. I know you weren't trying to have a go."

Remus dried his fingers carefully. "I was having a go. You frightened me, and I wanted you to understand that before you started making it sound clever."

Sirius looked down at the dressing showing above his trousers. Without the noise of getting inside and being treated, he could remember the distance between the alley and the place where he had finally managed to Apparate. There had been a moment when he couldn't make his hand grip his wand properly, and he hadn't told anyone about it.

"It wasn't clever," he said. "I thought it was going to be until it wasn't. Then I wanted to get back here."

Remus put the towel on its hook. "You shouldn't have to make me grateful you didn't die, Sirius. I'm grateful already. That's the problem."

From the next room came James's voice asking Peter what he had done with the butter, followed by Peter explaining that it was where James had left it. Lily said something about both of them having eyes, and the ordinary irritation in her voice made the kitchen feel less cold.

Sirius leaned against the counter rather than reaching for another answer. "Have you eaten anything since you went out?"

Remus shook his head. Sirius picked up two plates, let Remus take the heavier one without protesting and followed him into the sitting room, where Peter had kept a space for each of them on opposite ends of the same sofa.

1979

War did not arrive in their lives as one great change. It accumulated in things they couldn't quite arrange: a dinner postponed because someone hadn't returned, a letter unanswered because Sirius wanted something better to put in it, a knock which made James reach for his wand before remembering that he expected a friend.

There were still good evenings, and Sirius defended them with an obstinacy which irritated everyone until they discovered they had enjoyed themselves.

He bought a motorbike and spent an afternoon explaining the purchase while James lay on the floor examining its underside. Peter wanted a turn before Sirius had finished explaining which bits not to touch. Remus held a helmet in both hands and asked whether it was supposed to press quite so firmly against his ears.

"It's supposed to stay on," Sirius told him. "You can't have it sliding off every time you turn your head."

"I understand the principle. I'd just like to retain some feeling in my jaw while I'm benefiting from it." Remus tugged the strap, and Sirius stepped closer to show him the buckle, their fingers colliding beneath his chin.

From the doorway, Lily asked Sirius to stop starting the engine beneath her window. James claimed he needed to hear it again to understand something about the mechanism, then admitted he had no idea what the particular mechanism was called.

"Get up, then," Sirius said, offering him a hand. "You can understand it while we're moving."

They took a shopping list because Lily said there was no reason an excursion had to be entirely useless. Sirius put it into his pocket, James put on the helmet, and Peter stood back with the delighted expression of somebody witnessing an experiment for which he wouldn't have to accept responsibility.

They returned with the wrong bag of shopping and such ridiculous grins that Lily remained in the doorway until they stopped laughing long enough to explain.

"There were two bags on the counter," James said, lifting the one he had chosen. "They looked the same. I thought you'd said not to squash anything."

Lily looked inside. "You've brought somebody's flowerpots, James. There are three of them. How did you mistake flowerpots for eggs?"

"I didn't look directly at the eggs. I was trying to work out where to put the bag."

Sirius had to sit on the step. Remus took the parcel, looked inside and began laughing in the quiet way which always made Sirius worse. Peter tried to say that at least the pots hadn't broken, then lost the sentence when James offered to go and exchange them.

Lily nudged Sirius's knee with her foot before taking the flowerpots indoors. "You can both go. Preferably before the person who wanted these starts wondering what to plant their geraniums in."

James came back carrying the correct bag without being asked to prove it. They ate late, Peter claimed first turn the next time Sirius went out, and for an hour nobody looked towards the clock when there was a noise outside.

Sirius remembered that part later. At the time he was too busy arguing that flowerpots had made the journey considerably more exciting than the shopping would have done.

Later in 1979 · The Potters' House · After the Funeral

There were funerals as well. Sirius learned which robes could be cleaned quickly, which people wanted a hand and which would pull away if he offered. He learned that James became very quiet when somebody said there had been nothing anyone could do, and eventually he stopped saying it.

After James's parents died, Sirius stayed at the house for three nights without asking.

There were cups in the kitchen which nobody wanted to move. Mrs Potter's cardigan hung over a chair, a button missing from one cuff. A list on the dresser included something she had meant to buy, and James kept looking at it while other people discussed practical arrangements in voices which grew softer whenever he entered the room.

Sirius made tea because people kept arriving who needed to be given something. Lily found plates, Peter carried chairs from the other room and Remus took the coats nobody seemed to know where to put. Between them they kept the house functioning badly enough to seem human, and James thanked them so often that Sirius began pretending not to hear.

On the second afternoon James passed the cardigan twice. The third time he touched its sleeve and went outside without his coat.

Sirius followed with it. James stood by the gate where Sirius had once waited with the bag which wouldn't shut. The latch still made the same small scrape when the wind moved it, and the familiarity of the sound was almost unbearable.

"You don't have to stay," James said without turning. "I know you've got things at your own place. You haven't even got another shirt here."

Sirius held out the coat. James looked at it, then took it by the collar and stood for a moment with the empty sleeves hanging between them.

"I'll borrow one of yours," Sirius said. "You've got enough. Your mum used to complain about how many she found behind the chair."

James tried to smile. It didn't last. He put on the coat with one arm first, missed the other sleeve and let Sirius hold it steady without pretending he hadn't needed the help.

"I know you don't mind," he said. "I just meant you don't have to keep doing all of it. The cups and everyone coming in, and me not knowing where anything is when it's my own house."

"I know what you mean." Sirius stood beside him, close enough for their shoulders to touch if either moved. "I'm staying tonight. We'll sort out tomorrow when it's tomorrow."

James leaned an elbow on the gate and put his face into his hand. Sirius looked down the empty road, giving him somewhere private to break while remaining near enough that James wouldn't have to ask if he wanted him closer.

There was nothing useful to fetch. No drawer to open, no dressing to hold and no clever spell Sirius could spend years learning which would make the house behind them sound as it had before.

After a while James gripped the back of Sirius's coat and stayed like that. Sirius let him, his own hand closing over the gatepost where James's father had once rested a cup while explaining that he needn't settle every detail in a single night.

When Lily opened the door to ask whether they wanted tea, James nodded without lifting his head. Sirius waited until he could walk beside him, and they went back into the house together.

August 1980

Harry was smaller than Sirius expected, despite all the time he had spent imagining what James and Lily's son might look like. He knew babies were small, having seen them in shops bundled against people's shoulders, and had assured James several times that he understood what he was being asked to hold. He had washed his hands without being reminded and removed the ring he thought might catch on a blanket. By the time Lily offered him her son, he was beginning to find everyone's concern insulting.

Then the baby was in his arms, and understanding became considerably less useful. His elbows stiffened, and the confidence he had brought into the room deserted him as Harry moved beneath the blanket.

"His head," Lily said, shifting his wrist. "A bit higher. There. You don't need to hold your breath as well."

"I've got him." Sirius looked down and discovered that saying so hadn't made him more certain. "Is his arm meant to be under there?"

Lily adjusted the blanket. "He's put it there himself. He'll tell you if he changes his mind."

James hovered until Lily caught the back of his shirt and drew him away. He remained near enough to watch, which Sirius found both irritating and entirely reasonable now that Harry was no longer someone safely occupying another person's arms.

The baby's face was creased and solemn, one fist tucked beneath his chin. A faint line of milk showed beside his mouth. He opened his eyes, considered Sirius without enthusiasm and closed them again.

"He's gone to sleep," Sirius said. "Already. Is that all right?" He looked towards Lily without moving the arm beneath Harry's head, afraid that even a small adjustment might undo it.

"It's wonderful," Lily replied, settling against the pillows. "We spend quite a lot of time hoping he'll do it. You may have to come round more often."

Sirius sat because standing had begun to seem an unnecessary risk. James crouched beside the chair and touched the small foot which had escaped from the blanket.

"Look at that," he said, with such wonder that Sirius leaned closer before realising what he meant.

"It's a foot, James. I did expect him to have those." Sirius tried to sound unimpressed, although he was already looking at the small toes his friend had uncovered.

"I know it's a foot. Look how small it is." James slid a finger beneath the toes, and they curled against it. "He does that. He keeps doing it."

Something shifted inside Sirius so abruptly that he had to look at the blanket. James had made somebody. James and Lily, who left books open on tables and argued about washing-up and had once been seventeen beside the lake, had made this small sleeping person who would eventually open doors, ask questions and have opinions about where to sit.

Sirius tried to imagine a voice belonging to him. He could picture James teaching him to fly and Lily telling them both to get out of a tree, but the child at the centre of it remained impossibly small, his entire hand barely large enough to close round a finger.

"We've talked about the godfather thing," James said, still crouching. "I know we have. I only wanted to check you still wanted to, now it's all actually happened."

Sirius looked up. James was smiling, but the question beneath it was serious enough to deserve more than the joke Sirius had prepared about irresponsible decisions.

"Of course I do. You don't have to keep giving me a chance to get out of it."

Lily smiled into her cup. James looked relieved, then embarrassed to have shown it, and reached to straighten a corner of the blanket which didn't need straightening.

"You'll have to teach him something useful," Lily said. "Something beyond getting out of detention and convincing his father to buy things with engines."

"Getting out of detention's useful," Sirius protested. "He might need it. Look who his dad is."

"Then teach him something else as well." Lily glanced towards James, who had opened his mouth to object. "Preferably before the detention becomes necessary."

Sirius looked down at the sleeping face. "I'll think of something. We can start with which end of a broom goes first. Your father still gets confused when he's excited."

James shoved his knee gently, then stopped because Harry moved. All three of them watched the tiny shift beneath the blanket with the attention they might once have given a dangerous spell. Harry sighed and settled. Lily laughed first, quietly enough not to disturb him, and Sirius found himself smiling without having done anything to earn it.

James stood to fetch a camera. Harry woke as he did, opened his mouth and began crying with an indignation so complete that Sirius nearly stood too.

"What did I do?" he asked, looking from the baby to Lily. "I haven't moved. I don't think I moved anything."

"You haven't done anything wrong. He wants feeding." Lily held out her arms. "Bring him here. Slowly, you've got plenty of time."

Sirius passed him back with extraordinary care. James took the photograph before either of them was ready, catching Sirius halfway out of the chair and Lily looking up with her hair coming loose.

"Another one," Sirius said, settling back with his hands strangely empty. "You can't make that the one everybody sees. I look as though I'm about to fall over."

James looked at the camera, then at Lily and the child against her shoulder. His expression had softened into something Sirius was still learning to recognise on his friend's face.

"I'll take another," he said. "But that was a good one. You were looking at him."

Before Sirius left, Lily asked him to put the clean cloths on the shelf beside the bed. It was such a small request that he had finished before realising how glad he was to have something ordinary to do there, in the room where their son would sleep. James walked him to the door and reminded him to come back soon, as though Sirius might need persuading.

Outside, he stood for a moment with his hand on the gate. Then he went back to ask whether they needed anything from the shops, and Lily called down that he was to buy what was written on the list this time.

Summer 1981

By the following summer, Remus was away more often than he was with them. Sirius knew there were reasons. He had been told enough to understand that asking for every detail would make some things more dangerous, and he had lived beside Remus for seven years, long enough to know what secrecy cost him.

Knowing did not stop the questions accumulating when assignments went wrong and people failed to appear where they had agreed to be. Names reached people who should never have heard them, and every explanation left another space in which Sirius could imagine someone choosing differently. He found himself returning to the same conversations, rearranging the pauses and wondering whether a familiar voice could make a lie sound harmless. He hated what he was doing, then heard of another disappearance and went over everything again.

Remus came to his flat one evening with a bag over his shoulder and mud drying at the hem of his coat. Sirius had a kettle in his hand when he opened the door and stood aside without putting it down.

"I went to James's," Remus said. "He wasn't there. I thought you might know when he'd be back."

Sirius looked at the bag. "He knows you're home, does he? You told him you were coming?"

"I didn't know I would be until this morning." Remus stepped inside, then paused. "I came here after. Is that a problem?"

It was a perfectly reasonable answer. Sirius turned it over in his head, trying to find the part which didn't fit, and only realised he had been silent too long when Remus set the bag beside the chair without sitting down.

"Have they moved?" Remus asked. "I waited for a bit, but I didn't want to stand outside making the neighbours wonder."

"They've had to be careful. You know how things are." Sirius took the kettle towards the sink, grateful for somewhere to look which wasn't Remus's face.

"That wasn't what I asked." Remus had taken one glove off. The other remained half pulled over his fingers, forgotten while he watched Sirius. "I'm not asking you to give me an address somebody's told you to keep quiet. I'm asking whether I went to an empty house."

"I'll tell James you called." Sirius set the kettle beneath the tap and didn't turn it on.

For a while there was only the noise from the street: a car door, someone calling upstairs to a window, the ordinary traffic which continued whether they had slept or eaten or lost somebody since breakfast.

"What do you think I'm going to do?" Remus asked at last. He let go of the glove and stood with his hand half covered, no longer making any attempt to come farther into the room.

Sirius turned. The question had no anger loud enough for him to answer in kind. Remus stood beside the chair as though he was still waiting to be invited to use it.

"I haven't said anything like that," Sirius began. "Don't put words in my mouth because I can't tell you—"

"You haven't said anything. That's the trouble." Remus looked at the kettle, then at the cup Sirius had left upside down on the draining board. "I used to know whether you'd forgotten to offer me tea or whether I was supposed to understand something by it."

Sirius could have asked him to stay. He could have put the cup down, found the biscuits Peter had brought the day before and begun with one question instead of letting all of them remain unspoken. He had imagined demanding answers often enough; now that Remus stood in front of him, demanding them seemed likely to make the thing he feared real.

Instead he gripped the edge of the counter and said, "People are dying, Remus. We can't carry on as though everyone gets to come and go without anybody asking where they've been."

Remus's expression changed. He looked so tired suddenly that Sirius remembered the first afternoon they had sat on the dormitory floor, then resented the memory for arriving when he was trying to think clearly.

"I know they're dying," Remus said. "I'm not asking you to stop being careful. I'm asking whether I can come in here without you looking at me as though you've already decided what I am."

Sirius's hand tightened on the counter. He wanted to say that was unfair. He wanted Remus to give him an explanation which would make it obvious, ridiculous, impossible that he had ever doubted him. Beneath those wants lay a worse one: he wanted somebody else to accept responsibility for telling him what to believe.

Remus looked at his hand, then slowly pulled the glove back on, working each finger into place before he spoke again.

"Tell James I'd like to see him," he said. "When it's possible. And Lily. I brought a book for Harry, but you can leave it until somebody's sure I'm allowed to send one."

He took a small parcel from his bag and placed it on the table. Sirius didn't move. Remus waited long enough for him to say something, then picked up the bag and went to the door.

When it closed, Sirius filled the kettle. He put it on the heat, forgot the cup and stood looking at the parcel until the water began to whistle. Then he lifted it away and remained holding it, unable to remember why he had thought he wanted tea.

Peter stayed for tea the next afternoon. He brought a packet of biscuits which had broken in his pocket and apologised while emptying them onto a plate, trying to arrange the larger pieces on top.

"They're all right," Sirius said. "Leave them. They're going in the same place whether they're whole or not."

Peter gave him a small smile and sat in the chair Remus hadn't used. He looked damp, ordinary and grateful when Sirius passed him a cup. For a while they talked about the bike, a letter from James and the leak above Peter's mother's kitchen which somebody kept promising to repair.

Sirius hadn't realised how much he missed a conversation in which nobody appeared to decide how much to say before answering. Peter told him about a saucepan collecting water and his mother's refusal to move it because she had found exactly the right place. Sirius laughed. The laugh came more easily the second time.

"Have you seen Remus?" he asked eventually, stirring tea which didn't need stirring. Peter waited until Sirius looked up before answering, one of the larger biscuits held untouched above his plate.

"Not lately. Why, has he been back? I thought he was still away."

"He came here yesterday." Sirius looked towards the mantelpiece, where the photograph from his fifteenth birthday stood beside unanswered letters. Peter's younger self moved at the edge of the frame, turning into a blur before settling again.

Peter waited. He had always been good at leaving room for someone else to decide how much of a story to tell, and Sirius was grateful for it now in a way he had seldom thought to be at school.

"I don't know where he goes half the time," Sirius said. "He comes back and talks as though it ought to make sense already."

Peter rubbed a crumb between his fingertips. "He doesn't always say, does he? Even when he's back. I never know what I'm meant to ask."

It wasn't an accusation. Sirius had grown tired of hearing the shape of one in his own thoughts, and the mildness of Peter's answer let him put down his spoon.

"I shouldn't have had a go at him. He was standing there with his bag, and I couldn't even ask him to sit down without making it sound like a test."

Peter glanced at the chair beneath him, then at the parcel still on the table. "You can tell him next time. He knows you get wound up when you're worried."

Sirius nodded. Peter moved the plate nearer, and they ate the broken biscuits while the afternoon darkened beyond the window. Once Peter had gone, Sirius found a larger piece beneath his cup, untouched because Peter had kept choosing the broken ones.

He wrapped Remus's parcel properly and put it with the things to take to James. The letter he meant to write remained beneath the photograph, where he could see it and continue intending to begin.

October 1981

The last letter came folded round a drawing Harry had made with somebody else's help.

Sirius could tell which parts belonged to the child. Three broad streaks of blue crossed the paper, followed by a smaller mark and a place rubbed almost through. Beside them James had drawn something which might have been a dog if it hadn't had six legs. Lily had put a question mark beneath it and drawn a small arrow towards the unnecessary pair.

Sirius laughed before opening the letter. The owl shifted along the back of his chair, offended by the delay, and he broke a biscuit into the saucer beside it without checking whether this particular owl liked biscuits.

Dear Sirius,

Harry helped with this. I should warn you that he helped with the table as well, so if it smells faintly of polish that is why. James says the drawing is meant to be you. I think you should ask about the extra legs before accepting it, although he has informed me that movement is difficult to capture and I wouldn't understand.

Your godson has discovered that putting something behind his back does not make us forget he has it. This is a considerable disappointment to him. Yesterday he tried it with a spoon, then looked furious when I asked for the spoon back. James says he's showing initiative. James wasn't the one trying to eat with the other end of it.

Sirius laid the drawing flat. There was a dent in one corner which looked as though Harry might have tried to eat that as well, and a little smudge on the reverse which neither parent had bothered to explain. He turned it over twice before continuing.

We're all right. Before you ask, yes, properly all right. James has begun explaining Quidditch to Harry in the afternoons. Harry is mainly interested in the ball, which I understand is not sufficiently advanced for the lesson James had prepared. I've suggested they begin with not throwing it into the fireplace.

He laughs before he's done it now. That gives us a sporting chance, although his father keeps laughing back and spoiling my attempt to look stern. You can tell James what an excellent example he's setting when you see him. He might believe you, provided you disguise it as praise first.

Sirius could hear Lily saying it. He could picture James protesting from the other side of the room, then forgetting the protest when Harry did something worth watching. For a few minutes the house existed around him in pieces: the chair by the window, the cloth over Lily's shoulder, James leaving a cup somewhere inconvenient because the child had put out his arms.

It would be lovely to see you when we can arrange it. I know things are difficult. Please don't decide that means you ought to disappear until you can bring good news. You're allowed to come without a useful parcel or an answer to anything. We can find something ordinary to talk about. I've heard you manage it before, even if most of it concerned a motorbike.

Sirius read that paragraph again, taking longer over it than Lily could have taken to write it. His flat was cold; he had meant to light the fire before sitting down, but the owl arrived and he forgot. A shirt lay over the opposite chair, with a book Remus had left months earlier open beneath it. Several pages had caught in the sleeve, and Sirius reached over to ease them free without putting the letter down.

James is pretending not to watch me write this. He's asked twice whether I've mentioned the shelf. He put one up in the sitting room and would like somebody else to appreciate it. I have appreciated it very thoroughly, but apparently I remember the first attempt and cannot be trusted to judge the second fairly.

Eat something which didn't come out of a packet. And write back, even if all you can tell me is that you found a clean plate. Harry would like to know whether dogs eat peas. His father says we'll have to ask you. I think there may be a second question hidden in that one, so consider your answer carefully.

Love,

Lily

Below her name James had taken the quill. The first line slanted upwards before he corrected it, and Sirius knew without seeing him that he had moved the page instead of his arm.

She has left out that the shelf is straight. Harry checked it. He hit it with the wooden dog and nothing fell off, which is a more useful test than all that business with a spirit level. You may bring something impressive to put on it, as long as it doesn't make a noise after he's asleep.

Come when you can, mate. I've got something to show you which isn't the shelf. Don't look so worried. It isn't another shelf either.

James

Another blue mark sat below their names. Sirius touched it with one finger, then refolded the letter so the drawing wouldn't crease across the middle. The owl had finished the biscuit and begun examining a loose thread on the chair.

He meant to write back that night. He fetched ink, found a clean page and began with an insult about the six legs. After a while he crossed it out because James would have a better answer and Sirius wanted to save the argument for when they were in the same room.

He wrote about the bike instead. Then about the rain. He asked whether Harry had liked the book, added a question about the shelf and crossed that out as well because it sounded too much like inviting James to explain the shelf.

Eventually he stopped, looking at Lily's instruction that he needn't bring an answer to anything. There were so many things he ought to say and so few which seemed sensible in a letter, where someone could read them when he wasn't there to explain what he had meant.

On the page in front of him he had written, I'll come soon. He left it there, put the drawing somewhere it wouldn't be spoiled and went to light the fire before the flat grew any colder.

November 1981: Evelyn Price

The man outside the chemist's had been standing in the rain for nearly ten minutes before Evelyn Price decided he was waiting for somebody.

He hadn't come in, although he had looked through the window twice. He wasn't studying the display, either. Nobody had ever looked quite that stricken at a half-price offer on sticking plasters, and the cough mixture beneath it had been there long enough to lose any claim to novelty.

Evelyn watched him over the till while she counted the change again. Four pounds sixty. She had made it four pounds fifty the first time and couldn't work out where the ten pence had gone. Behind her the radio was losing an argument with rain rattling against the small window above the dispensary, and Mr Bennett had called through once to ask whether the next prescription had arrived.

She answered that it hadn't, checked the pile beside the till and looked outside again. The man turned sharply towards the corner, his attention fixed beyond anything she could see from the counter.

He was young, she thought. Younger than he had seemed at first. Wet dark hair clung to his face, his coat hung open and he had the appearance of somebody who had been awake so long that washing and eating had become other people's concerns. One cuff was torn. Something dark marked the back of his hand, and he rubbed it once against his coat without looking down.

Evelyn wondered whether to offer him the use of the telephone. People sometimes waited outside when they hadn't enough money to make a call and disliked being the first to ask. She had begun moving the stack of prescriptions away from it when another man backed into view along the pavement.

This one was shorter, with thinning hair plastered across his forehead. He kept looking behind him, though there was nothing there except the greengrocer's awning and Mr Shah setting a crate beneath it to catch the worst of a leak.

The dark-haired man said something. Evelyn couldn't hear it through the glass, but she heard the answer: a high, startled sound which made the woman at the bus stop look round.

She left the till drawer open. The smaller man stepped off the kerb, slipped and caught himself against a parked car. He shook his head while the other followed him into the road.

It was a narrow street, too narrow for the delivery lorry which came on Wednesdays and never found anywhere sensible to stop. That morning cars lined both sides, a bus edged past the turning and a cyclist waited with one foot on the ground. People had to move round the two men to reach the crossing, and a woman carrying a pram bag glanced back with an expression of ordinary irritation.

The dark-haired man seemed unaware of all of them. His attention remained on the smaller man's face with such intensity that Evelyn stopped thinking about telephones.

She came out from behind the counter. She had seen arguments in the street before. Usually Mr Shah dealt with them, or Mr Hobbs from the butcher's, who was large enough to make people remember where they were. This was different. Neither man looked drunk. Neither seemed to be performing for the people beginning to watch.

The shorter one looked terrified. The taller one looked as though he had found something he had been trying very hard not to find.

Evelyn pushed the door open. The bell sounded above her, bright and ordinary, and cold rain blew against her stockings.

"You ought to get off the road," she called. "There's traffic trying to come through. Whatever it is, you can't stand there."

Neither looked towards her. The smaller man had his back against the car, one hand near his middle and the other half raised, palm out. His mouth moved before enough sound came from it for Evelyn to understand.

"Sirius, listen to me. You mustn't do this." The shorter man spoke with his hand still raised, edging along the side of the car as though he hoped to find more room behind him.

The name meant nothing to her. It was simply the first word she heard clearly, and she remembered it because the dark-haired man reacted as though being addressed by it had hurt him.

He moved closer. Evelyn saw what he was holding then: a narrow piece of wood darkened by rain. At first she thought it was a broken walking stick. He lifted it towards the other man's chest, and she thought, absurdly, that it must be some sort of gun.

"Don't do that," she said. "Put it down, whatever it is." Her voice came out much smaller than she intended.

The cyclist lifted his foot to the pedal, decided against it and stayed where he was. Someone behind Evelyn asked what was happening. She didn't turn, because the distance between the two men had narrowed and she felt that looking away might allow something to happen which couldn't happen while somebody watched.

"How could you?" the smaller man cried. His voice carried down the street with terrible clarity, and the people waiting for the bus grew quiet.

The dark-haired man's face changed. "Don't you dare stand there and—" A bus engine roared as the driver tried to clear the turning, and Evelyn lost the rest beneath it. Through the passing windows she saw the smaller man press flatter against the car, his mouth working quickly, and the other leaning forwards as though he could force an answer out of him by getting nearer.

Then the bus passed, leaving wet exhaust and a clear space between them and the crossing.

"James and Lily," the smaller man said. "You gave them to him. How could you give them to him?"

Evelyn felt someone stand beside her. Mr Shah had left the crate beneath the awning and was wiping his hands on a cloth. He looked from one man to the other, his expression no longer merely curious.

The taller man took another step. "You don't get to say their names. You don't ever get to stand there saying their names."

He spoke quietly enough that Evelyn almost missed it. His hand had begun to shake, but the wooden thing remained pointed towards the shorter man's chest. The shorter man looked towards the people on the pavement now, his lips parted as though he couldn't get enough air.

"Call the police," Evelyn told Mr Shah. "Go on. I'll stay here." She touched his sleeve to make certain he was listening, unable to take her eyes from the two men.

He hesitated, looking at the wood, then towards the chemist's telephone. Evelyn asked again, and he turned back towards his own shop.

The smaller man moved away from the car. Only a few inches, but enough to bring him nearer the narrow passage beside the butcher's. Rainwater had been running towards a drain there all morning, collecting round a wet newspaper caught against the grille. Evelyn remembered noticing it because Mr Hobbs had complained twice that someone would have to clear it before water came through his back door.

"All those people," the smaller man said, louder now, his eyes moving across the pavement.

Evelyn didn't understand what he meant. She thought he meant the people standing round them and began turning to ask everyone to move back. His raised hand dropped out of sight between his body and the parked car, and the taller man lunged.

There was a flash so bright that Evelyn saw the bones of her fingers through her hand. Then the street struck her.

For a moment there was no sound. The window beside her came apart in a glittering sheet, and she felt pieces touch her face before understanding what they were. Something hit her across the chest and threw her backwards through the doorway, where she landed among bottles from the display.

The floor was wet beneath her. Her first thought was that she had broken everything and Mr Bennett would be furious. Her second was that she couldn't breathe.

She opened her mouth. Her chest wouldn't move properly, and when she tried to pull in air the effort brought a pain so sharp that she stopped trying for a moment and lay staring at the underside of the counter.

One shoe was missing. She discovered that while attempting to draw up her knees, as though finding the shoe might be the first part of making sense of the rest. The bell above the door still trembled against its frame, but she couldn't hear it.

Glass covered her skirt. There was a long white line across her thumb, and she watched it open red before coughing hard enough to bend forwards over her knees. Air entered in a shallow, ragged pull which hurt so much she nearly cried out, and the pain was a relief because it meant she had managed to breathe.

Sound returned as a thin, continuous ringing. Beyond it somebody was screaming, although Evelyn couldn't tell whether the voice belonged inside the shop or outside in the road.

She put a hand against the floor. Something sharp entered her palm, and she snatched it back, leaving a red print on the tiles. With her other hand she caught the counter and pulled herself upright far enough to see the opening where the shop front had been.

The window, display shelf and most of the door had become a pale confusion across the pavement. A strip of blind swung from one fastening. Rain came through the gap, stirring papers round her ankles and darkening the labels of boxes scattered beneath the till.

Outside, the road had opened, leaving a space where Evelyn knew she had been looking at two men only moments before. She couldn't understand its size. There had been tarmac there: a white line, a puddle and the cyclist's front wheel. Now a jagged hole ran across the street, with broken pipes showing through the torn surface and water rising in muddy bursts from below.

A parked car had folded against a lamppost. Its alarm sounded weak and irregular beneath the ringing in her ears. Farther along, the cyclist's bicycle lay on its side with the rear wheel turning, and Evelyn looked for its rider without finding him.

Someone lay beneath the greengrocer's awning. She recognised the green coat before recognising the woman, who had come in for cough medicine the week before and apologised for paying in coins. One arm stretched across the pavement, its hand still closed round the handle of a shopping bag. Apples had rolled into the gutter beside her.

Evelyn went towards her. She didn't remember deciding to. She was beside the counter, then on her knees and somehow outside, with glass shifting beneath her remaining shoe. Her stocking caught on something. She pulled it free and nearly fell before getting one hand against the wall.

"Can you hear me?" she asked, crouching beside the green coat. "It's Evelyn, from the chemist's. I'm just here."

The woman's eyes were open. Rain collected on one lens of her glasses, and Evelyn reached to wipe it away before understanding that it wasn't the useful thing to do.

She touched the woman's wrist, searching for a pulse she had only ever found on herself. The fingers remained curled round the shopping bag. There was nowhere obvious to put a bandage, although her mind kept offering things from the shop: cotton wool, scissors and the first-aid box beneath the counter.

Evelyn took the bag out of her hand. She didn't know why. It seemed wrong to leave her holding it, and setting it beside the wall was a task she could still understand.

"Evie, come away from there." Mr Shah was coming towards her with blood down his shirt. He had lost the cloth and pressed his bare hand against the side of his head. "Get back. There might be another one."

She looked past him. A man tried to lift part of the bus shelter while someone beneath it cried out. Another sat in the road, staring at his own leg. Through the dust a voice kept calling the same name, waiting after each attempt as though the next silence might finally contain an answer.

In the middle of it stood the dark-haired man, and Evelyn couldn't understand how he had remained on his feet. There was a crater between him and the chemist's, glass everywhere and people on the ground who had been farther from the blast. His coat had blown back against a railing, one side of his face was streaked with blood, and the wooden thing hung from his hand as though he had forgotten he held it.

He was looking at the torn edge of the road. Evelyn pointed, unable to make the sentence she wanted, and Mr Shah followed her gaze.

The smaller man had disappeared. She searched anyway: beside the car, beneath the falling edge of the awning and among the people at the crossing. She had seen his thin hair, his wet collar and the hand he raised as though that might stop what was coming. There ought to have been somewhere he had fallen, somebody beside him or a movement which proved she had simply looked in the wrong place.

The dark-haired man made a sound which Evelyn thought meant he was going to be sick. His shoulders folded, his free hand rose towards his mouth and for a moment his whole body seemed unable to decide whether it could remain upright. Then he began to laugh, the noise too loud and too sudden, breaking off halfway before starting again. He looked at the hole in the street and laughed until he had to drag another breath through it, the sound catching high in his throat before falling apart.

Mr Shah moved in front of Evelyn. "Don't look at him. Come back to the shop with me."

She couldn't stop. There was something small and pale on the pavement near the man's boot, almost hidden beneath broken brick, and she looked away so quickly that her neck hurt. She understood then why she couldn't find the other man, and the understanding made her begin to shake.

More people arrived. Evelyn had no idea where they came from. A woman in a dark coat put a hand beneath her elbow and spoke firmly about moving away from the damaged mains. Two men approached the laughing man from opposite sides, neither in uniform, both walking with a certainty Evelyn wanted to believe meant help had come.

"His hand," she tried to tell the woman. "He's got something. He pointed it at the other man."

The woman said Evelyn must sit down. She guided her away from the green coat, keeping a steady hand beneath her elbow when Evelyn tried to turn back.

"The other one was only standing there," Evelyn said, and stopped because she couldn't make the memory fit into words anyone could use. "He was asking him something. There were names."

"We are helping them. Come with me, please." The woman's voice remained calm, and Evelyn let herself be moved because remaining upright had become a task she could no longer manage alone.

One of the men took the wooden thing from the dark-haired man's hand. He let it go without looking up. There were hands on his arms now, and he seemed to discover them only when they tried to move him.

He raised his head. For a moment he looked straight at Evelyn, and she forgot the hand beneath her elbow. She looked at him while the woman spoke, unable to make herself turn away. People on the pavement hadn't moved since the blast, but he seemed to have forgotten everyone except the man who wasn't there any more.

She had never seen anyone look so ruined. For a moment she thought he might tell her what had happened, and she waited, scarcely feeling the hand beneath her elbow.

Sirius looked back at the torn street.

When he began laughing again, Evelyn let the woman lead her away.