What Follows In Silence.

The night stretched on, an endless void that swallowed everything around Harry. Wrapped in his invisibility cloak, he moved through the Hogwarts gardens with the grace of a predator, silent and deliberate, his every step infused with a cold, calculating presence. The anger from the Dementor attack still simmered beneath the surface, but it was more than that. It was the familiar, gnawing emptiness—a void that Harry had long since learned to live with. He didn’t seek connection, didn’t want to. No one could understand him, not really.

And that was fine.

It was easier this way. Easier to be alone. Easier to keep everyone at arm’s length. No one could hurt him if they didn’t get too close. The people around him, they had their roles to play. Draco, the others—they were just… there. Disposable. No one really mattered. Except for the few who had seen the real him. Tom. Teeth.

They understood.

But the garden was cold tonight, a bite in the air that seemed to touch something deeper inside him. Harry didn’t mind it. The cold was familiar. It was comforting in its own way.

That was when he saw it.

A large, black dog, moving through the shadows, its presence unsettling but not in the way Harry expected. It wasn’t an immediate threat. No, this creature—this Grim—was something else entirely. Harry’s eyes narrowed, and he paused in his movements, watching the dog.

The Grim.

The omen of death.

But this one… didn’t feel like an omen.

The dog stopped and lifted its head, locking eyes with Harry. There was no growl, no bark, no show of teeth—just a quiet, knowing gaze. And it wasn’t filled with the usual menace. No, it held something else. Something… sad. It was almost like it understood him, as if it could see past the walls Harry had built. And Harry didn’t know why, but there was a sudden tug deep in his chest.

He stood there, unmoving, staring back at the dog. There was a strange familiarity in its gaze, like it recognized him. Like it knew him. But how could it? How could anything?

A few steps forward, and the Grim didn’t flinch. Its eyes never left Harry’s. There was no malice in its gaze, just—sorrow?

It was then that Harry reached out, instinctively. His fingers brushed the dog’s fur, cool and soft, and the creature leaned into his touch. It was unexpected, this quiet moment of connection, but Harry didn’t pull away. He didn’t feel the need to. For once, something wasn’t trying to hurt him. It wasn’t trying to invade his space, to chip away at his walls.

The Grim nuzzled his hand again, and Harry’s heart skipped, a fleeting pulse of something he didn’t want to name. It wasn’t warmth. It wasn’t peace. But it was something—fragile, like a butterfly with one wing, delicate in its own painful way.

Harry’s hand hovered over the dog’s fur, his breath shallow. "You’re not so bad, are you?" he murmured, his voice distant, almost detached. It wasn’t a question for the dog—it was for himself. But the Grim didn’t answer. It simply leaned into him again, as if seeking comfort.

Harry wasn’t sure why, but in that moment, he felt something stir inside him. Something he never allowed to surface—something like… hope, maybe. But it was fragile. A fleeting thing that felt more like a wound than anything else.

The dog pulled back slowly, its gaze lingering on Harry before it turned and walked away, disappearing into the shadows of the garden. Harry stood still, unmoving, as the weight of its presence settled in the air long after it had gone.

He hadn’t expected this. He hadn’t expected to feel anything.

Goodbye, he thought, the word a soft, muted echo in his mind. Goodbye to something he couldn’t quite grasp. Something he didn’t know how to hold onto.

The next morning, Harry sat in Divination, the encounter from the night before still gnawing at him. He felt unsettled in a way he couldn’t describe, as if the presence of the Grim had left something behind. It wasn’t a comfort, but it wasn’t a threat either. It was… just there, lingering like a ghost.

Professor Trelawney droned on about the mystical meanings of tea leaves, but Harry wasn’t listening. His thoughts were elsewhere. They were on the dog. The Grim. The strange sadness in its eyes. The way it had looked at him.

He didn’t know why it had happened, why the dog had seemed to understand him in a way nothing else ever did. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been… real.

The tea leaves swirled in his cup, settling into a shape. Harry stared at it, his eyes narrowing as the shape became clearer.

A large, dark dog. The Grim.

It was an omen of death, wasn’t it? He should have felt fear. But all he felt was an odd emptiness, like something deep within him had connected to it, even if just for a moment. And the emptiness was more painful than the fear.

Trelawney mumbled about doom and destruction, but Harry wasn’t listening to her anymore. He was too lost in the image of the Grim in his cup. The Grim that had found him. That had looked at him like it knew him.

He stared at it, unblinking, as the cup trembled slightly in his hands.

Sirius Black watched Harry from the shadows, his heart heavy with a grief he could barely stand. The boy—the boy who looked so much like James—it was almost too much to bear. He could barely look at him without feeling the ache of everything he had lost.

It wasn’t just that Harry had his eyes, his smile, his mannerisms. It was something deeper. Something that made Sirius’s chest feel like it was being ripped open every time he saw him. He had wanted to be there. He had wanted to be a part of Harry’s life, to make up for the years lost, to protect him from the things Sirius had never been able to protect James from.

But now, as he watched Harry move through the garden with that same predatory grace, Sirius knew he had already failed. Harry was so much like James—so much like the man Sirius had once known—but also so far removed. Detached. Cold.

When their eyes had met, when Sirius had seen the flicker of recognition in Harry’s gaze, it had felt like someone had torn his soul in two. This wasn’t the same child he had hoped to find.

Sirius wanted to reach out, to hold him, to tell him it was okay. That he wasn’t alone. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t get too close. Not yet.

So instead, he stayed in the shadows, watching the boy he couldn’t protect, the boy who had never known him.

And when the Grim had nuzzled Harry’s hand, Sirius had nearly broken.

If Harry only knew who the Grim truly was. If he only knew that the dog was him, that he had been watching from the shadows, aching to hold him, aching to comfort him, maybe, just maybe, Harry would understand.

But for now, Sirius could only stay hidden, the weight of his grief suffocating him, as Harry walked away into the night, a butterfly with one wing, fragile and beautiful in its sadness.

The Grim was not an omen of death.

It was a shadow of something that had already been lost.