English Ivy
Sirius stood beside the Black Lake and threw stones in the water as viciously as he could.
It wasn’t Bella, it wasn’t. And really, Sirius should have known that. In Bellatrix’s eyes, Sirius was family and he was a traitor - but they spent years in prison together, years spent swapping insults for amusement and terrifying the others with their laughter.
Family was fine to curse, to cut, to make hurt. Blacks didn’t kill one another, not if there were other options.
Torture had been Bella’s choice, a good one too. Bella had been unmatched with the cruciatus curse, just as powerful as Sirius had been with twice the constant anger.
Sirius threw another stone and saw it play again in his mind - Sirius laughing as he parried curses with Bella. He had been thinking about one summer when they were kids and Sirius had hexed her hair to become locks of snakes. Bella loved it, that was what Sirius had been thinking —
“Bloody Medusa,” Sirius laughed cruelly at the black snakes hissing at him from Bella’s head. He was still smarting from a curse she hit him with and should have done something much worse.
Bella conjured a mirror and Regulus had been the one to snort a laugh then at the immediate awe-struck look on Bella’s face.
“Oooh, my babies,” Bella cooed. She lifted her hand to touch the snakes and they must have sensed she was also cold-blooded and inhuman, because they quieted down and nuzzled her damn hand.
“Baby Bella is in love,” Narcissa sang from where she sat on a bench beside Andy. “Bella and her snakes, sitting in a tree…”
Sirius pouted at his hex being taken as a tender gesture. He was also annoyed that everyone was paying attention to Bella and her bloody hair.
“Fight me,” Sirius said, shoving Reggie’s shoulder. “You and Bella against me.”
Bellatrix heard the challenge and sent the mirror flying away from her. It struck the nearby tree and shattered on the ground, sending little prisms of color to play up in Sirius‘s vision.
“I don’t need a partner to beat you,” Bella said haughtily. “Go play, Reggie. Cousin Bella’s gonna make you the Black Heir.”
“We do not kill our cousins, Bellatrix,” Andy said patiently, not even looking up from her book. Sirius knew it was a muggle textbook charmed to read ‘101 Curses for your Enemies’, nobody else did.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Bella said with the mean smile that was the mirror to Sirius’s own.
“No fun at all,” Sirius agreed.
Bella tried to hit Sirius with a crucio right off the bat, Sirius dodged it and sent his own imperio at her.
No curse was unforgivable in their family, but they had never dueled to kill before.
That had been the duel Sirius thought of when he had been in the Ministry. Sirius thought about distracting Bella by giving her snakes for hair again. When the jinx hit him, Sirius didn’t even have time to think about what spell it was or why Bella would be knocking him backward at the time.
Bellatrix wouldn’t. She would want to have Sirius broken, defeated, humiliated. Then she could gloat and tell him he lived because she allowed him to.
Narcissa was Sirius‘s favorite cousin when he’d been a boy, Andy when he grew up. Bella had always been too much like Sirius for him to like her.
It wasn’t Bella that sent Sirius through the veil, it was someone hiding in the shadows, someone who might have something to benefit from Sirius disappearing.
Sirius knew, he fucking knew, who it was. Who else? Who else could have beaten him to the Ministry and would have hid themselves during the fight?
“I DON’T CARE!” Sirius roared with a fist to the table. “YOU’LL FIND A WAY BACK TO THAT CASTLE TO PROTECT HIM OR I SWEAR TO MERLIN, ALBUS, YOU WILL NEVER SEE HIM AGAIN!”
“Sirius, please.” Remus put a hand on Sirius’s shoulder and tried to calm him, he was probably embarrassed about the scene Sirius was making. Plenty of the others looked embarrassed, Sirius didn’t care.
They had kids they loved at Hogwarts - Sirius had his entire world at the castle. If anything happened to Harry while Albus was banned from the school…
No. They’d leave first, they would.
Sirius raised his chin and glared at Albus, challenging him with his eyes. Sirius Black was not a wizard lacking in resources or ingenuity in using those resources. If Sirius wanted to disappear with Harry, Albus should know that he would never see either of them again.
Albus placed too much weight on a prophecy; Sirius could read the fucking stars.
Mars had been visible that morning, war was coming. Not the hidden in the shadows fight that they had been seeing, but a true war. It would be aggressive, Cronos’s planet had shown itself as well. The death toll would rise as Vega did, Sirius couldn’t risk Harry being one of the deaths.
“Very well,” Albus conceded, tipping his head in a polite nod. “I will do what I can, Sirius. You must have patience.”
“I left my patience in Azkaban,” Sirius snarled. “You’ll find it in my cell if you care to check.”
Sirius challenged Albus in front of an audience and a week later he was knocked into the veil. That Sirius Black had died - the one of 1996, the one that couldn’t comply with the orders of a man who did nothing for him.
But Harry went with him and poof, the plans of that Albus were gone. And if the Albus Dumbledore who sat in his office and watched two Slytherin first years with a close eye thought that Harry Potter was going to do a damn thing for him or his cause, he was wrong.
Sirius was hurt. Beneath all the anger, there was hurt that Albus had never trusted him, probably hadn’t in years —
“Will you do it, Sirius? For the Order, for your loved ones?”
“I would rather die. You can’t ask that of me, I won’t do it. Don’t ask again.”
If Sirius hadn’t fully trusted Albus since 1978, the night before his graduation when Albus tried to twist him into the role of a spy, he wondered how far back Albus’s distrust of him went.
So Sirius was stinging from another betrayal, one that ended his imprisonment and began his second chance, and Harry was furious.
A furious Harry was a thing of wonder.
Harry’s anger wasn’t being burned out in short and hot bursts like Sirius’s was, oh no. Harry was petty, playing a game so cunning that Sirius wondered how Harry ended up in Gryffindor in the first place.
It started that same day, the day Sirius spent in a fugue state of disbelief. Sirius had wanted to skip classes, take a nap and brood. Harry refused to skip, he refused to even miss breakfast.
Sirius couldn’t figure it out, why Harry had a sudden desire to throw himself wholeheartedly in conversations with the others in their house that morning. Harry pulled Draco, Cibelle Yaxley, Theo Nott, Pansy, and Daphne all in an energetic debate about the summer solstice. Sirius sat on the sidelines, quietly sharing some fruit with Blaise while he waited to figure out what Harry was up to.
It took Sirius a few days to figure it out.
When Harry told Sirius they needed to skip dinner one night to go to Hogsmeade for an important errand, Sirius had been confused but determined to solve it himself. When Harry bought a snake and began carrying it around with him, taking every opportunity to talk to it, Sirius figured it out.
Harry had been told by Snape that he was acting like a traditionalist, a dirty word for Albus. Albus had to be behind Sirius’s trip through the veil, he had to be. So Harry was going to be everything Albus hated - a pureblood pretender, a perfect heir, a traditionalist with a pet corn snake.
It was a riot, really. Certainly Harry had never been as popular amongst their housemates as he became —
Boy Who Lived. Magical Prodigy. Heir to the
Three Ancient Houses. Quidditch Star. Parslemouth.
The bruise Harry sported for a few days didn’t hurt either, it went well with the scar that Harry didn’t hide as much anymore. It reminded everyone that Harry was disliked by some and didn’t care, didn’t bend, didn’t change.
Sirius found it all terribly amusing, but he was exhausted that day and watching Harry taunt the Headmaster with every word he spoke didn’t seem like much fun. Harry went to class, Sirius went outside. What Sirius wished he had, just for a second, was to have one candid conversation with his cousins, his brother.
The Black family had madness, power, talents, and each other. Bella was a crazy bitch, she would have laughed if Sirius screamed while she cursed him (“First or to scream loses. Loser has to steal Cissa’s favorite ribbon! Ready? Go! Crucio!”), but she didn’t try to kill him.
Sirius bent down to take a large stone and saw someone approaching from the corner of his vision. It took no effort to recognize who it was, Remus Lupin hadn’t been able to sneak up on Sirius since they were boys.
“Afternoon,” Remus said evenly as he joined Sirius on the bank of the lake. “It would probably be silly of me to mention that you should be in class, right?”
Sirius’s reply was to throw the rock he held as far as he could, wishing that the rock lodged in his chest would sink like the other stones.
“I’ve been worried about you,” Remus said. Sirius glanced at him, momentarily irked at Remus’s greater height. It didn’t used to be so pronounced, but they had been eleven together… grown up together in many ways.
Grew together, side-by-side like flowers in a garden. Their petals had touched, their stems twisted together at times. They had been in the same soil, received the same water and sought out the same sunshine.
Side-by-side.
“If you wanted to talk about whatever it is that’s bothering you, I —”
“Going to talk to me now?” Sirius asked, a harshly mocking question. Sirius didn’t bother to bend over for a rock, he managed to summon one without his wand in a burst of anger.
Remus had spent the entire year pretending Sirius didn’t exist, pretending that he couldn’t be a source of endless information for Sirius if he wanted to know about ‘his father’. Remus had buddied up with Snape, began following Albus like a domesticated wolf. Remus sat in a courtroom and voted for Snape to take guardianship of a boy he struck a week later.
Sirius wouldn’t so much as talk about the weather with Remus Lupin, not anymore.
“Ah. So you know.” Remus had his hands in his pockets and he rocked on his heels, his eyes firmly glued to the far side of the lake. Sirius didn’t want him to have a peaceful view, he didn’t fucking deserve it.
Sirius pulled his hand back and launched the rock he held as far as he could, internally smirking when it landed in a rush of magic and distorted the entire surface of the lake.
Sirius couldn’t work for peace, he should have never tried. Destruction? That was something he could achieve without trying.
“I know,” Sirius said. “I know you left m- my father in prison, I know you didn’t do a damned thing for the man you said you loved.”
If Remus had been the one in prison, Sirius would have swam across the ocean to at least verify with his own eyes and ears that he had worked against James. If he had, Sirius would have killed him. If he hadn’t, Sirius would have freed him.
Loyalty wasn’t difficult, not if the devotion was there.
“Your father committed a terrible crime,” Remus said, so gently. “I’m afraid that I may never have known him at all.”
“You’re right.” Sirius focused on the lake and channeled his rage into magic, raising the water higher and higher with his wand. The creatures on the bottom of the lake would be gasping, unable to live without water. Sirius raised it a bit higher, straining with the weight of the spell.
The creatures at the bottom were struggling, suffering, and it lightened the load that Sirius carried in his chest for weeks.
When Sirius slashed his wand down, sending the water to crash back in place and explode in waves of terror while it tried to righten itself, Sirius took a step backward.
“You never knew him.”
What Remus knew had been the Sirius that Sirius wanted to be, he only had glimpses of Sirius as he was. If that person Sirius so desperately wanted to be hadn’t been good enough for him, then Sirius would have only continued to disappoint.
Remus loved the version of Sirius that Sirius created just for him. That had been the easy Sirius to love, the one that Sirius infused all his best parts in and tried to lock out the dark parts.
And had Sirius ever loved him? Truly loved him? Remus had been Sirius’s best friend, his soulmate… he thought. When they were teenagers, Remus had been everything that Sirius idolized - a carefree rebel with muggle roots, progressive ideals, and a need for acceptance.
Sirius didn’t know when he had changed so much that the man who was splashed by lake water and drenched from the waist down disgusted him, but it happened. Remus disgusted Sirius, everything about him did.
People changed… being pushed through a veil in the Department of Mysteries by the so-called leader of the light could do that to a person.
Sirius caught up with Harry at the end of classes. It was so close to summer that nobody seemed interested in rehashing their class, nobody except for Hermione Granger.
“Hello, Sirius,” she said politely when Sirius shoved his way between her and Harry. Harry’s snake, Cosmo, snuck its way out of Harry’s shirt collar and hissed as it reached out to lick Sirius’s cheek. The thing was bloody creepy, Sirius would give it that. The shopkeeper said it was a corn snake, but Sirius didn’t know of any corn snake with black diamonds down its body and blood red eyes.
Cosmo was harmless, if bothering Sirius while carrying on secret conversations with Harry was considered harmless.
“Hey,” Sirius replied to Hermione dully. He let Cosmo slither over to him and tried to mimic Harry’s hisses for the pleasure of seeing Hermione go pale. Harry didn’t care, Harry didn’t care about a damn thing anymore, he only smirked some and moved his shirt collar so that Cosmo could switch over to Sirius more easily.
“I’m bored,” Sirius told Harry, a pointed whine. Sirius wasn’t bored, he wanted Harry’s attention. It had been too divided lately while he played out his own anger. “Come duel me?” he asked.
Harry loved to duel, he was damn good at it too.
Circe, how many times did Sirius rewatch his own memory, searching for any concrete evidence of who jinxed him only to get distracted by Harry? Harry had been holding back when they dueled in defense, Sirius wanted to see him unleashed.
It was sick, the way that Sirius wanted to see Harry in every moment, every mood, every situation. Sirius’s brain had wrapped itself around Harry and refused to leave him be.
Harry triggered the curse of the Ouroboros within Sirius. The more Sirius knew about Harry, the more he needed to know. It was sick, Sirius was going to swallow himself whole trying to know every facet of who Harry was.
James had been shouting in the void on Halloween, he would hate Sirius. But Harry loved him. And Harry was the one who was there, who had altered Sirius’s chemical makeup.
Harry loved him, Sirius didn’t think there was a limit to what he would do for Harry. It was nothing like anything Sirius experienced before, nothing that anyone had ever experienced.
“Yeah, we can do that,” Harry agreed. “Do you want to go outside or the seventh floor?”
“Seventh floor,” Sirius said, itching then to push Harry just past his breaking point. Sirius smiled, sharp, eager. “No rules this time.”
It took Harry a moment to return his smile, but he did. Blaise, Draco, Daphne, and Pansy all immediately begged to watch, which Sirius acquiesced. Hermione and Neville Longbottom asked Harry if they could watch as well, and Harry agreed.
Sirius didn’t think they needed an audience, too much potential to make Harry shy away from what he could do. It wound up being an unfounded fear, Harry hardly needed pushed at all.
The kids were overly impressed with the professional dueling chamber that Harry made the Room of Requirement become. It was nice, twice as nice as the dueling chamber Hogwarts used to have. There were raised seats on one side, the glimmer of a shield in place to protect the spectators.
Sirius and Harry went down in the pit to face off from each other. There was plenty of room for them, though they could hear each other clearly from their opposite ends.
“Can you really throw off the imperio?” Sirius teased Harry, pulling his wand and twirling it casually, making his intentions clear.
Harry’s eyes narrowed and Sirius became giddy when he saw Harry pull his wand in preparation.
“Maybe not,” Harry said, a bold-faced lie, Sirius was almost positive. “So when you said no rules…”
“I mean no rules,” Sirius said. “Unless you’re scared. You’re not a Gryffindor after all. It’s fine if you need some rules, no one’s judging you.”
The Slytherins in the stands holding Cosmo notwithstanding.
“Oh, piss off,” Harry called with half a laugh. “I didn’t die in the graveyard, did I?”
“Luck!” Sirius joked. “Our wands aren’t brothers, so let’s have a real duel, eh?”
Sirius didn’t want to hurt Harry… or maybe he did. Maybe Sirius wanted to see exactly how much he could hurt Harry before it was too much, there had to be a line somewhere. Harry could torture Sirius for hours, Sirius would never be the one to draw a line between them.
Harry moved first - Sirius let him.
It was silent, a knockback jinx. The move caught Sirius by surprise… Apparently Harry wanted a psychological duel between them.
That was fine, Sirius wanted to see Harry falling apart, fighting like his life was on the line. When Harry wasn’t holding back - holding himself in check - that was what Sirius craved.
Harry delivered and it was beautiful.
They parried for a minute, nothing serious. They were building up to it, Sirius could sense it. Harry was getting a feel for Sirius while Sirius waited for him to snap.
Sirius got bored with the silly and mildly-dangerous transfigurations he sent at Harry and decided to test him, to see if he could - to see what happened when he went too far.
If anyone screamed when Sirius sent a silent crucio at Harry, the blood red spell that his cousin favored, Sirius didn’t hear them. Sirius didn’t hear anything at all over the rush of power and fear in his ears.
Harry crumbled on the ground, every muscle of his body straining. Harry didn’t scream, Sirius was sure of that. Sirius only held the curse for ten seconds, just long enough for Harry to see it wasn’t a game anymore.
Harry could stand up and walk away from Sirius forever, Sirius would deserve it.
“You… bloody… prat…” Harry lifted his head and a shock went through Sirius, like electricity and life, at the bloodshot and watering green eyes glaring at him.
Lily’s eyes had never looked like that.
“Crucio!” Harry cried.
Sirius wasn’t a masochist, but he was curious. Sirius let the curse hit him and he couldn’t help that his scream sounded like a laugh at the sheer intensity of Harry’s curse. Harry held it for twelve seconds, Sirius counted as he writhed.
“First curse?” Sirius asked, panting when Harry broke it off. It hurt, hurt like hell, but it also woke Sirius up and made everything feel more clear.
So maybe he was something of a masochist, he thought he might be able to blame his parents.
“Is my arm supposed to be tingling?” Harry asked. Harry had to have been Gryffindor for his bravery, because it certainly wasn’t chivalrous when he tried to take Sirius’s wand before Sirius even made it off the floor.
Sirius bounced back quickly and they were off again, mixing curses in with hexes and jinxes. Harry liked to hex, Sirius liked unexpected transfigurations. It was easy enough to turn Harry’s shoes into snapping turtles that tried to take his ankles out, it was much more difficult to dodge the slew of hexes Harry sent in retaliation.
“It’s power,” Sirius said. “That tingling? That feeling of magic sparkling inside of you? It’s power.”
Harry smiled slowly and it was sharp, it was oozing with satisfaction.
“I like it,” Harry admitted to Sirius as he slashed his wand, trying again to curse Sirius.
Harry’s curse missed Sirius, but Sirius’s struck Harry.
“I do too,” Sirius said, terrified of his own admission.
Sirius shouldn’t like it, he shouldn’t be counting to thirteen so that he could hold Harry under his curse one second longer than Harry did before. Sirius should despise it, despise the memories that flooded him with the power he used freely.
It had to be because of the battle, because of the way it ended. Sirius was craving power because he had been rendered powerless by someone he trusted.
That had to be all it was because otherwise Sirius might not know himself at all.
Their duel was ended by Sirius, even if Harry had fought with everything he had. Harry was powerful and quick, Sirius had years of experience on him. They walked up to the spectator stands together, their arms wrapped around each other's necks while they laughed.
Harry’s lip was busted open and bleeding, Sirius’s entire back was one big bruise. Harry had a limp, Sirius would have to regrow a tooth when he got in front of a mirror.
It had been just the ticket to ease the itch inside of Sirius, even if he knew that it was only temporary.
“You’re going to give your cousin grey hair,” Draco said as they approached. He held his arm out straight so that Cosmo could crawl from his body to Harry’s while shaking his head at Sirius.
The others looked torn between admiration and terror. Daphne’s lips were red from where it seemed she had chewed on them and Pansy’s face was pinched in discomfort. Blaise didn’t seem disturbed any, good kid he was.
“Cissa’s too young for grey hair,” Sirius quipped to Draco. “And I don’t see that anything that happens inside this castle needs to be shared with her.”
That had been a threat and Sirius hoped Draco would heed it. Sirius wouldn’t go through the rest of his second-chance school days with someone writing his relative tales about his shenanigans. Sirius had enough of that the first go around.
“I meant me,” Draco said with a roll of his eyes.
Harry laughed, a burst of laughter that Sirius assumed he had tried to withhold. Draco seemed pleased that he made Harry laugh, his cheeks turned light pink anyway and he ducked his head.
Cosmo hissed to Harry and Harry abruptly looked around and must have noticed what Sirius had immediately.
“Where’d Hermione and Neville go?” Harry asked the others. “Cosmo said there was a spat?”
“It wasn’t a spat so much as Granger asking what the spells you used were and Longbottom not particularly wanting to watch crucio used for fun,” Blaise answered. Sirius’s stomach twisted with momentary guilt, he’d forgotten that Neville would be watching, that Neville would know the exact damage that Crucio could do.
Sirius knew the power of the Unforgivable Curses, Neville knew the damage.
“Oh.” The exhausted peacefulness beneath Sirius’s arm began to tighten again as Harry realized that not everyone was going to be okay watching him and Sirius curse each other as stress relief.
“Forget it,” Sirius told him quickly, not wanting to see Harry’s easy grin slip away any further. Sirius shook him lightly, jostling the soreness that Harry had to feel. “Quidditch finals tomorrow, we should sleep.”
“Yeah, Harry!” Draco jumped and must have decided that he would unknowingly help Sirius keep Harry’s spirits high. “You’re only one match away from us keeping the Quidditch Cup!”
It was a shame that Harry winning for Slytherin would be a boon to Snivellus.
Draco and Harry took the lead out of the Room of Requirement and down toward the dungeons. Sirius hung back beside Blaise, debating on popping by the Hospital Wing for a nip of skelegrow to speed up the tooth Harry summoned right out of his bloody mouth.
“My mother wants to meet you,” Blaise said randomly while they all trooped down the hidden staircase in the back of the castle.
“Me?” Sirius asked. “Why?”
Sirius had met Blaise’s mother once. It had been when he’d been younger, much younger. She had been at a gala with her second or third husband. Sirius had been twelve, maybe, and used her as evidence to himself that he wasn’t queer.
Juliana Zabini would have been a princess in the House of Savoy, had Italy not become a republic before her birth. She married the fifth president of Italy when she was nineteen and continued to marry men of power and means every time one of her husbands died. Juliana sat on the Universal Council of Magik and had the type of influence that people like Lucius Malfoy only dreamed of having.
Sirius was flattered by the invitation, confused as well though.
“Because you’re interesting and my mother likes interesting people,” Blaise said with a shrug. “She wants you to bring Harry too, she said she hasn’t met a real seer in years.”
And she wouldn’t, because Harry wasn’t a seer. Harry was a time-traveler who kept saying things he shouldn’t know. Sirius did as well, but he thought people were beginning to chalk his statements up to insanity while Harry was politely referred to as ‘divinationally gifted’.
“I don’t know if we can fit a trip in this summer,” Sirius said. He held his fingers up and airily counted off all the places they needed to go. “We’ve got a trip to Albania planned, one to Leeds. I think Susan’s aunt wants us to spend a few days at her place, and if Harry doesn’t go see his guardian then the old man might actually cry.”
“Mother isn’t going to let you do all of that,” Draco shot at Sirius over his shoulder. “And you can’t run off again, she was going spare, Sirius.”
“She’ll go spare again,” Harry said. Harry tipped his head to the side and Sirius could see the smile tugging at his lips as Cosmo lunged from Harry’s shirt collar as if he were going to bite Draco. Draco shrieked and jumped away and Sirius laughed at him.
“Cosmo won’t hurt you,” Harry tsk’d. He stroked the snake on the top of his head lovingly, practically nuzzling the damn snake in the middle of the stairs. “Not like I will if Draco tries to mess up our plans, right, Cosmo?”
Harry must have repeated himself in Parsletongue because Cosmo bobbed his head, causing poor Draco to go entirely white. Draco muttered something about how he wasn’t going to say anything to his parents and Sirius clapped his shoulder a touch too hard to be entirely friendly.
“I never doubted you,” Sirius told him cheerfully. “We’re like brothers now, right, Draco? Brothers should keep each other's secrets, cover for each other.”
Sirius and Regulus had been like that… until they weren’t. Sirius didn’t expect it of Draco, but Draco hastily agreed anyway.
Harry brought it up that night when he and Sirius were laying in bed, going over their plans once more for the summer. There was so much to do and Sirius knew Harry was anxious to get it all right, to keep more people from dying like his worthless relatives had.
“How much do you bet Draco’s going to send his parents a letter first thing in the morning?” Harry asked after they debated again on the best way to get to Albania. They needed to be unobtrusive and apparating there would be the quickest route to being tailed by international law enforcement wizards.
“Let him,” Sirius said carelessly. He kept running his tongue over his teeth, self-conscious that he had regrown his tooth to be crooked. Harry never healed his split lip and Sirius didn’t offer to do it for him, it gave Harry some charm. Not that he needed help in that department.
“We can’t have the Malfoys and Dumbledore after us,” Harry pointed out, suddenly logical. “We should come up with some cover story, something they’d have to let you do. I don’t suppose a summer job would be a thing they’d allow?”
“Probably not.” Sirius ignored the creepy sensation of Cosmo sliding down beneath the blanket between them, the cool scales tickling Sirius’s skin where it touched. “It’s a shame wizarding internships are out of style… I’m sure Lucius would be too happy to let me do that.”
“I hate this,” Harry sighed. “We should have aged you up during the summer so we didn’t have to dance around guardians.”
Sirius had considered that, originally. It had been one of his first ideas after appearing in 1991. Sirius could drink an aging potion, transfigure his appearance some, give himself a new identity and still insert himself in Harry’s life. The only thing that had stopped him was the reminder that Harry would spend most of his time at Hogwarts and things would hardly be any different than they were before.
“We’ll figure it out.” Sirius rolled until the space between him and Harry was gone and they could get in a comfortable twist of legs and arms. Harry’s hair was tickling Sirius’s nose and Cosmo had twisted himself around their ankles, a complete link.
Nothing was going to make Sirius regret putting himself back in Hogwarts with Harry. Not the Malfoys or the murder of Petunia Dursley. Not Dumbledore or his manipulations.
Nothing.
They were in it together, wrapped around each other and changing destiny, like English Ivy. Twined together, so entangled that none could tell where one stopped and the other started. They were choking each other, becoming more vibrant for it.
If the world burned, Sirius still wouldn’t regret it. They could save the world or condemn it, as long as they did it together.