hadrian sirius black

Potter Manor was different to how Sirius remembered it.

He could recall as clearly as if it was yesterday what Potter Manor had looked like on his first visit - he had been sixteen at the time, and desperate to escape Grimmauld. He had fled through the Floo at the dead of night, and arrived in a room which was awfully similar to the house he had just left, yet also so very different.

The drawing room in Potter Manor had been all mahogany accents and vaulted ceilings, just like Grimmauld, but the paint had been a warm red rather than the sickly green he had grown up surrounded by.

The wooden flooring was brown rather than black, and the chairs were inviting - even the imposing wingback chair facing the fire was patent, glistening in the flickering firelight, and was much more appealing than Orion’s dragonskin one, with clawed feet which reminded Sirius too much of the man’s clawed cane.

In the intervening years, the drawing room had evidently undergone extensive renovation - the vaulted ceiling was gone, and the floor was now carpeted rather than wooden. Fleamont’s wingback chair was gone, seemingly replaced by two overstuffed armchairs, and the chairs scattered about the room seemed to have all been replaced with sofas - much more accommodating for a family, he supposed.

The colour scheme was also much more garish - the aforementioned carpet was the same shade of red as the walls, and the Gryffindor heraldry was even more obvious, with gold accenting thrown into the already eclectic mix. It was quite hard on the eyes, but with the amount of children in the house he supposed they must have had some influence on the design - plus, he would be lying if he said his house wouldn’t have looked exactly like it in his twenties if his better half hadn’t stopped him.

“Avi, Rose, go play, loves. I’ll be along in a minute,” Lily told her twin daughters, who had poked their heads into the room at the sound of the Floo activating. Neither of them listened - instead, both of them were staring at Sirius with unabashed curiosity.

“Are you Harry’s dad?” one of them asked, which explained the staring, although it did nothing to make him any less uncomfortable.

“Er, yeah,” he replied awkwardly, looking to Lily for assistance - he wasn’t going to discipline someone else’s children, but he did find it slightly disrespectful the way they had just flippantly ignored their mother’s request.

Lily sighed, and bustled over to the door to shoo them off, a process which took about a minute - Sirius had a sneaking suspicion that these twins were just as mischievous as Fred and George. Finally, she slammed the door and returned to where she had left him standing by the fireplace, slightly pink in the face and looking quite embarrassed.

“Sorry about that. No idea how to listen, those two - I’ve tried my best, but it’s an impossible task with the way James enables them,” she groused, seemingly forgetting who she was talking to. Sirius let out a noncommittal hum, not particularly desiring to talk about his one-time best friend’s parenting.

“That’s nice, Lily. Now, what did you want to talk about that’s so important that you had to drag me through your Floo for it?” he asked. He didn’t particularly care for how much he sounded like his grandfather in that moment but, for all the distaste he held for Arcturus Black, he couldn’t deny that the man knew how to get people talking.

Lily’s flush deepened at his words, and she immediately started speaking.

“Yes, yes, sorry about that, it’s just-” she trailed off, crossing her arms and looking at the space above Sirius’ shoulder. “Could you sit down? I don’t want to have this conversation standing up.”

Sirius’ brows knitted together, but he obliged her request, taking a seat on one of the sofas, with Lily sitting on the opposite end. They sat in silence for a moment, before Lily slowly started speaking.

“I was up late last night, reading,” Lily began, and Sirius had to suppress a smile - that right there was Lily Evans to a tee. Evidently, there were some things which just never changed. “And I was about to turn in when I bumped into Archer. She’s a night owl, like me, so I didn’t think much of it. I was halfway to telling her to get back to bed and be done with it when I realised that she had a letter. Can you guess who the letter was for, Sirius?” she asked, a slightly hysterical note slowly creeping into her voice as she continued.

“Harry,” Sirius replied, because there’d be no reason for Lily to tell him this if it wasn’t. Still, he was failing to see where she was going with this, or why she seemed to be getting so worked up about it.

“Right. Of course, I asked her why she was sending an owl to Harry at two in the morning. The owlery’s open all day, and if she’d only just written the letter surely it would be better to send it off in the morning than risk waking someone up with an owl, right?”

Sirius really didn’t like how strained her voice was getting. It reminded him of hushed conversations towards the end of sixth year, when Lily had started showing and had been appalled at the prospect - how having a baby would ruin her chances of a career after Hogwarts, and how it would ruin things with James, who she had been hoping to make things serious with after a year of dancing around the prospect following her fallout with Snape.

This was a Lily who was about to lose her rag, and he surreptitiously cast a privacy ward over them as she took a deep breath to rally herself - he had every confidence that the drawing room was already warded, but better to be safe than sorry.

“She told me that she didn’t want James to see that she was writing Harry - that she thought he’d be mad at her,” she continued, stressing the word ‘mad’ as though it were a ludicrous thing for James to be. Personally, Sirius thought Archer had the right of it - Harry never failed to return from a visit to the Potters’ with something unsavoury to say about James.

Every time his son came back through the Floo, not happy about a day spent with his mother and siblings as he rightfully should be but with a biting critique about James Potter rolling off his tongue, Sirius felt a little part of himself die - the part that wished he could go back to being sixteen, with James and their band of marauders by his side.

“Obviously, I told her she didn’t need to worry about that - James would hardly be mad at her for writing to her brother, and we’d be having words if he was,” she ploughed on, oblivious to Sirius’ internal dialogue. Something about the way she said it sounded as though she were trying to convince herself rather than speaking her truth and, sure enough, after a moment, her carefully composed expression cracked.

“But he would, wouldn’t he?” she seethed, rage taking over where practised indifference had previously been. “I’ve been so fucking blind, Sirius!”

She wasn’t sitting anymore - she had gotten to her feet, and was pacing in front of the sofa in that restless way of hers which Sirius remembered all too well; for a moment, he was back in the Gryffindor common room, trying his best to blend into the background as Lily broke the news to James that she was pregnant with another man’s child, and that that man was his best friend.

“It’s been right under my nose this entire time, and I never bloody saw it! How Harry never talked about James to me, how the kids only talk about Harry when James isn’t around, how the visits just kept getting fewer and further between,” she listed off, before coming to an abrupt stop.

Her mouth was pressed into a thin line and her eyes screwed shut, and for a moment Sirius could only wonder what on earth she was going to do next. Then, her expression warped into one of anguish, and she collapsed back onto the sofa, the rage having left her as fast as it had arrived.

“I chose my husband over my son, Sirius,” she whispered, sounding so very unlike the Lily he had known. Even when facing adversity no teenager should have to face, he didn’t think he had ever heard her quite so… broken. “Harry must hate me.”

Hate was likely the wrong word for it, Sirius thought. It was an apt descriptor for how his son felt about James - although he couldn’t bring himself to feel the same, no matter how much he wanted to for the way the man treated his son - but it certainly didn’t describe his feelings for his mother.

Harry wasn’t much like either of his parents in that he was not particularly outspoken - he gave his opinions in confidence, and lacked his mother’s compunction to speak her truth, and Sirius’ inability to hold his tongue. Still, what went down at Potter Manor was not kept completely secret from Sirius, evidenced by the fact that he knew how much his son disliked his former best friend.

It wasn’t obvious to anyone who wasn’t looking, but when Harry spoke about Lily, you could tell he cared about her, and about what she thought of him. It didn’t stop him from criticising her, but his critiques centred more around what he wished she did differently as opposed to how much he hated her - and, when he said something positive about Lily, it was with a quiet but iron determination, as though daring someone to correct them.

No, Harry certainly didn’t hate Lily. 

“How can I fix this, Sirius?” she asked. Her voice was little more than a whisper, but her eyes gave her away - they were desperate, the emerald green shining brightly just like her son’s did when he was truly afraid - the incident in third year when his little brother had almost died came to mind.

Still, he wasn’t sure if it mattered. Harry didn’t hate Lily, but he also didn’t hate Sirius. That hadn’t stopped him from boarding the Hogwarts Express without saying goodbye in his first year, or having week-long stay overs at the Burrow when he grew sufficiently irritated with Sirius. 

Sirius had messed up - he had been trying to fix his mistake for over a decade now, and only had a tepid relationship with his son to show for it, which could thaw over once more if he made another misstep. Lily would be playing catchup for seventeen year’s worth of fuck-ups - you would have to forgive him if he thought that she wasn’t likely to get anywhere fast in that pursuit.

“I don’t know, Lily. I don’t know,” he repeated. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he added, “But I do have a few suggestions about where you can tell James to stick it when he gets home.”

-hadrian sirius black-

“Harry, you got a ‘mo?”

Adhara paused mid-anecdote - a particularly funny one, involving Harry, their great-grandfather Arcturus and a misappropriated sticking charm - and turned to look at the person who had just stuck their head into the compartment, as did everyone else.

Looming over them was perhaps the biggest person she had ever seen, sans Hagrid. He was every inch as tall as Harry, perhaps even a couple taller, and doubly as wide - it was a wonder his shoulders could even fit through the compartment door. His slytherin tie jumped out at Adhara, and she felt she had seen him before, but his name steadfastly refused to come to her.

“Sure thing, Cass,” Harry replied, getting to his feet and following the other boy out of the compartment. She suddenly remembered who their mystery visitor was - Cassius Warrington, a seventh year and Slytherin chaser, although she could not for the life of her figure out why he wasn’t a beater or a keeper. Harry had him over at least once a year, which their dad didn’t seem to appreciate - she had not actually met him until she was ten, despite him coming over every year for pretty much as long as she could remember, because her dad had insisted she stay away from him.

“Wonder what Warrington wants with him?” Fred -at least, she was fairly confident it was Fred - asked.

“Merlin knows. Maybe they’ve brought Flint back in for his ninth year because they can’t find a captain,” George replied snidely. Adhara refrained from commenting - there had been several comments bandied about concerning members of the Slytherin team by Fred, George and Lee which Adhara didn’t agree with, although she had followed Harry’s lead and kept her silence about them.

Flint had accompanied Warrington on the visit where Adhara was finally properly introduced to the other boy, and she had watched the two boys and Harry play pickup quidditch. Flint, although a bit intimidating, really hadn’t seemed as bad as the Gryffindors were making him out to be.

A few minutes passed in which Fred jinxed Lee’s locks to spin like the propellers on a helicopter and Lee retaliated by charming Fred’s hair green in the name of entertainment, before Harry reentered the compartment, a wide grin on his face and a badge pinned to his lapel.

“Guess who’s just been made quidditch captain?” he asked smugly, retaking his previous seat in between Fred and George.

“What?!” Adhara, Fred and George all exclaimed at once; that made absolutely no sense. Captains were always chosen before term started. How had Harry received the badge whilst on the train?

“Well, Snape had chosen that berk Montague as captain,” he began explaining. Fred and George’s noses wrinkled in distaste, and Adhara fished around for any mentions of Montague Harry had made previously, only to draw a blank. “But Cass and Adrian threatened to resign if they didn’t take his badge. Obviously, Snape didn’t want to lose two of his best chasers, so he gave it to me instead - looked like he wanted to chuck the thing out the window rather than give it to me, mind, but he still did it,” he announced proudly, turning the little badge so that it shone in the fading sunlight.

“Fuck off!” Fred exclaimed, punching him in the shoulder. George made a sound of mock-outrage and turned to face his twin brother, hands on his hips and a scowl on his face.

“Language, Frederick! There are little ones about,” he lectured in a voice which sounded scarily like Mrs. Weasley, getting a snort of laughter from both Fred and Harry, who had likely heard the Weasley matriarch use those exact words before. Adhara, however, was not amused.

“Oi! I’m not little, you divvy!” she complained, kicking George in the shin. It was a point which might have gone over better if everyone in the compartment wasn’t over a foot taller than her; as it was, the entire compartment burst into simultaneous peals of laughter.

George actually fell out of his seat from laughing so hard, while Fred was clutching onto Harry for support. Even Lee, who had so far been the quietest out of the five of them, was bent over double as he laughed. Harry was doing the best at containing himself, but he still had a big, stupid smirk on his face which made Adhara feel not quite as bad about being laughed at by the entire compartment, even if her face was burning red with embarrassment.

“Course you aren’t little, Addy. Where would anyone ever get that idea?” he teased, which sent the rest of the group into renewed fits of laughter. Feeling that this had gone on quite long enough, Adhara leaned forward, fixing Harry with her best glare and played her trump card.

“If you don’t get them to stop, I’ll tell them the story with grandma and the sword,” she threatened. She had perhaps used that threat a few too many times now, as the blood didn’t drain from his face like the first time she had used it and the smile didn’t even leave his face, but he did wave his wand and the entire cabin was suddenly struck dumb.

He held the spell for as long as it took for the other three to stop being racked with silent bouts of laughter and begin to grow concerned at the fact that they could not speak before he released it, getting to his feet as he did so.

“I’m going to go check in with Charlie and Archer. You want to come with me, Addy? I’ll get you properly introduced,” he offered. Adhara took a moment to mull it over, a moment in which the twins quickly inserted themselves into their group, claiming they were going to go check in with Ron and Ginny, before she eventually agreed, although her stomach was swimming with nerves.

She knew realistically that Charlie was Harry’s younger brother, and that would likely take precedence over his being the Boy-Who-Lived during their introduction, but she couldn’t help but feel like she was vastly underprepared for meeting someone very important as she walked down the train.

They bumped into a few people along the way, all of whom seemed to know either Harry or Fred and George. A blonde Slytherin boy who could only have been a Malfoy held them up for a moment to exchange pleasantries with Harry, which she noticed Fred and George looked decidedly unhappy about, and the three of them were waylaid by several younger years, who seemed to be hanger-ons of sorts.

For the first time, she was struck by how genuinely popular the unlikely trio were. She had heard stories from her dad about how he and his Marauders - who there were supposedly four of, although she knew the name Remus Lupin out of the other three - had been popular during their own time at school, but Harry had never mentioned anything similar happening to him.

Fred and George had mentioned having something of a fanbase back in their compartment, but she had never imagined it to be so… extreme. They must have shaken off ten people by the time they finally got to their intended destination, a compartment which seemed packed to bursting with people and surely would not tolerate an extra four visitors.

Regardless, Harry rapped his knuckles smartly on the door before sliding in without waiting for an answer, with Fred and George slinking in after her and Adhara nervously edging into the now very overcrowded compartment.

“Y’know, the point of knocking is so the person inside has a chance to refuse you. Kind of pointless to knock if you’re going to come in anyways, isn’t it?” a voice groused from the far end of the compartment. Adhara craned her neck, and found herself staring at a shock of black hair, glaring at Harry from behind a pair of round glasses with bright green eyes - just like her older brother’s.

“Nice to see you too, Charlie!” Harry replied, completely ignoring the younger boy’s surly tone. “So…”

Behind him, Fred was giving a very embarrassed Ron a noogie, while George was saying something to Ginny. However, she wasn’t paying very much attention to that - in front of her, tucked into the very corner of the seat, was a girl with a mass of wine red hair and hazel eyes, behind an identical pair of round glasses as Charlie’s. Archer Potter; Archer Potter was staring at her.

“Err, hi,” she said, and immediately hated herself for how awkward it sounded. Why was she like this? She was perfectly fine around people she knew, but the moment she was forced to speak to a stranger, her ability to speak like a normal human seemingly evaporated. She half-expected Archer to just go back to the book which was cracked open across her knees but, to her surprise, she didn’t, and instead shot Adhara a tentative smile.

“Um, hi. I’m- I’m Archer. You’re Addy, right?” she asked meekly, extending a hand out. Adhara couldn’t help but notice that it was trembling slightly as she shook it, and that her fingers were frighteningly slender - Adhara was struck with the mental image of them snapping if she squeezed too hard.

“Yeah, I’m Addy,” she confirmed, injected with confidence at the fact that Archer seemed just as nervous as she was.. She cast a brief glance over her shoulder to see if she was likely to be interrupted, and decided that she likely wouldn’t be - Harry was deep in conversation with Charlie, Fred appeared to be getting shouted at by Ron and George was occupied with a ditzy-looking blonde girl talking his ear off - Adhara thought she might be a friend of Ginny’s, but she wasn’t entirely sure.

“What’re you reading?” she asked, because the book on Archer’s knees looked as thick as one of Harry’s sixth year textbooks - it surely had to be interesting for someone her age to be reading it.

Sure enough, Archer’s eyes lit up and she flipped the tome so that it was upright with the cover facing Adhara. She leaned in closer to read the title, and her eyebrows shot up into her hair when she did.

‘A Spellcrafter’s Compendium by Viridian Potter’

The book was a grimoire. In the back of her mind, she couldn’t help but wonder what on earth the Potters were thinking - she hadn’t even seen any of the Black family grimoires, much less been given access to one - but that more sensible part of her was vastly outweighed by the part that thought this the coolest thing she had ever seen.

“Wow,” she breathed, and Archer shot her a small but genuine smile. She was quite content to have just seen the cover, but Archer seemed unwilling to leave it at just that as, after a moment of worrying her lip between her teeth, she patted the sliver of seat which had been freed up between herself and Ginny when the blonde girl Adhara was now fairly sure was called Luna had stood up.

“Come read with me,” she implored. Adhara hovered uncertainly, considering that offer to be a highly dubious one. It was one thing to allow people outside of the family to see a grimoire - it was another entirely to allow them to read it. If noticed by the wrong people, it could signify a whole assortment of things which she was sure Archer hadn’t intended to imply by inviting her to read with her.

And yet, she really wanted to see what was inside of that book. She spared a quick glance to make sure that Harry and Charlie - the two members of the compartment most likely to sense something amiss with this gesture - were still occupied, and found Harry laughing with a slightly chubby boy she was at least eighty percent sure was Neville Longbottom, while Charlie stared pointedly at the wall in a move she could recognise from a mile away as an attempt to disguise his amusement. 

She doubted they would look her and Archer’s way for quite a while, so she took the free seat space, shooting Archer a bright smile before turning her attention to the book. 

As it so happened, spellcrafting was ever so slightly beyond the capability of two eleven year olds; Adhara had been right to think the book interesting, but it was also incredibly obtuse, and they had only managed to slog their way through about five pages before they were caught by Harry, who provided cover while Archer stuffed the grimoire back into her bag, cautioning them that they ought not to let Charlie know what they had been doing - apparently, Archer wasn’t even supposed to have the book, and it had actually been entrusted to Charlie at the start of his third year, which meant Archer had pilfered it out from under him.

Adhara shot Archer an incredulous glance once that information came to light, not having taken the sickly, bookish-looking girl for a thief, but Archer just offered a devilish grin in return as she closed her bag. In the end, she had to return to her original compartment to go fetch her robes, as they were now getting very close to Hogwarts, but she came away from the encounter with the distinct impression that she had made a friend.

How weird was that? The first friend she had made at Hogwarts was another one of Harry’s little sisters! Imagine the odds of that…

-hadrian sirius black-

“Oi, Harry,” Cassius said, elbowing his lanky friend. Harry, who had been staring into the stars above the Slytherin table, jerked to attention, glaring at him in a way which demanded an explanation, and fast. “Look at the firsties,” he elaborated.

Harry thought that that explanation was somewhat lacking, but he did as he was asked, and immediately saw what Cassius had been calling attention to. At the very back of the line of silent first years, his two little sisters had their heads together and were whispering in a very unsubtle manner, which had drawn the attention of a few of the other first years and the ire of Snape and McGonagall.

“Oh, brilliant,” he said sarcastically, eyes fixated on the head table. McGonagall had that look of straight-lipped disapproval on her face that she got when faced with any sort of rule-breaking, but Snape’s stare was downright malevolent - he looked as though, if he were able, he would see both Adhara and Archer drop dead where they stood.

McGonagall cleared her throat twice before his little sisters got the message that they really ought to shut up, and Harry had to stifle a groan - he could already tell they were going to cause all sorts of untold trouble once the school year got going.

Finally, once silence was enforced, the Sorting Hat sung its stupid song that Harry didn’t pay one ounce of attention to and ‘Abercrombie, Lewis’ was called up to the stool, and quickly shunted off into Hufflepuff. There were a couple more names which Harry ignored, before Adhara was called up to the stool, and Harry refocused his attention solely on her.

“Five galleons says she’s with us,” Cassius whispered, staring at the stool just as intently as Harry was.

“Ten galleons says she’s a lion,” Harry countered. There was silence for a moment, and then Cassius grunted his assent to the bet. It was a horrible bet - Harry had absolutely no idea what house Adhara would be sorted into, because he felt she had the qualities to go to any of the four if she so desired - but he was feeling reckless, and had a gut feeling that his sister would pull through for him.

It took a good three minutes, the longest Sorting so far, but the Hat eventually pronounced her a ‘GRYFFINDOR!’. Harry was the first person on Slytherin table to clap, and only a scarce few others followed his lead, but he made up for it with the volume of them. He didn’t let up until the next person was at the stool, and Snape was looking at him as though he wished Harry to combust - not that he would ever truly wish such a thing on his best Potions student, but the look was still present.

“Prick,” Cassius muttered as he dropped ten galleons in front of Harry, before returning his attention to the Sorting. There were a few curveballs along the way, such as a boy who was unequivocally muggle-born judging by the Nike shoes he wore underneath his robes being sorted into Slytherin and Lord Nott’s grand-nephew being sorted into Gryffindor, but Harry felt the pot had remained relatively unstirred thus far - a muggle-born cropped up in Slytherin every couple of years, and the Nott boy was the youngest son of a cadet branch - hardly an earth-shattering event that he was not sorted into the family house.

Thus, when Archer walked up to the Hat, he was at least fairly certain she would be a shoe-in for Ravenclaw - it wasn’t the traditional house for Potters, who tended to favour Gryffindor, but it was hardly unheard of, and he just couldn’t see his little sister in the red robes - appearances could be deceiving, but Archer really wasn’t all that brave. Devious when needed, obviously, but definitely not brave.

However, her Sorting was not the quick affair he had envisioned - she put on the hat, and then the silence went on and on, cruising past five minutes like it was nothing. Finally, after almost nine minutes under the hat, Archer was pronounced a ‘SLYTHERIN!’, to the shock of absolutely everyone.

There was complete silence for perhaps a second, and then someone started clapping. Harry’s eyes snapped to the source of the sound; Adhara. Of bloody course it was. Attempting to push past his shock, he started clapping too, and a split-second later so did Charlie. Soon, half of Gryffindor and half of Slytherin was clapping, with most of Ravenclaw and a few Hufflepuffs joining in too - a truly strange mix of supporters, for a truly strange sorting.

“Cass, budge,” Harry hissed, having spied that the first years this year had dispersed throughout the table, rather than clumping together at the end as they usually did - he did not want his sister on her own with some of the more unsavoury members of their house, such as Montague.

Cassius didn’t need telling twice, and cleared a space between the two of them for Archer, shunting about a half dozen people down the bench in doing so. There was a lot of grumbling, but no-one dared take their grievances further than that with the imposing figure cut by Cassius Warrington, and Archer took her seat without further issue as the next person went under the hat, looking deathly pale and even more sickly than usual.

“Do you need to go to the hospital wing, Archer? You look ill,” he fretted, deciding any comments about her sorting could wait. Archer had been ill often as a child, and there had been a big health scare when she was six which had had Harry fearing he might lose her. She had been improving steadily since then, but he was never going to forget the tense wait in St. Mungo’s for the Healers to do their jobs - it was perhaps the only instance he could recall of he and James Potter being of the same mind, as they had both whiled away the hours pacing with restless energy, while Charlie sat in stony silence and the twins flitted between Harry and James for attention, old enough to know something was amiss but too young to know what to do about it.

“I’m fine. You don’t need to baby me, Harry,” Archer complained. Harry levelled her with a supremely unimpressed look, staring pointedly at her paper-white skin, and she slumped in her seat, recognising defeat when she saw it. “I don’t know. Maybe?” she hazarded. Harry sighed - a decidedly unhelpful answer, but one which he was accustomed to - and gave it a moment’s thought before filling up one of the empty goblets with water.

“Drink. If you aren’t feeling any better by the time the Feast starts, I’m taking you to the Hospital Wing,” he instructed in a tone which brokered no argument. She nodded and slowly drained the goblet, with Harry watching her with one eye and the Sorting with the other.

“You’re a real mother hen, you know that?” Cassius teased from over Archer’s head. Harry didn’t dignify that with a response, knowing that Snape would likely have his head if he caused any more disturbance than he already had done during the Sorting, and instead clapped politely as ‘Selwyn, Desdemona’ was sorted into Slytherin. He’d have to keep an eye on her - she was the sole heiress of Lord Selwyn’s oldest son, and would be making waves one day if the family remained in the standing it was currently in.

The Sorting ended without any further complications after ‘Zeller, Rose’ was sorted into Hufflepuff, and Dumbledore delivered a speech which he mostly tuned out concerning the Triwizard Tournament. There was a lot of muttering about that, but Harry was not amongst those doing the muttering - Sirius had tried to keep the tournament a secret from him as something of a prank, but he had pilfered a letter from his father’s office explaining the whole thing, so it hadn’t really worked.

Once the food appeared, he refocused his full attention on Archer, who was looking slightly healthier now, although there was still a pallor to her skin which he didn’t like the look of.

“Feeling any better?” he asked, to which she nodded. “Good,” he said, before loading up his plate with food.

“You entering the tournament, Harry?” Cassius asked through a mouthful of pork. Atrocious manners, but Harry wasn’t bothered by it at this point - Archer was a different story, as she wrinkled her nose in disgust at the older boy, averting her eyes.

“Course. Hogwarts’d be scuppered if I didn’t, wouldn’t it?” he joked. In truth, he had not reached the decision quite so easily - once it became apparent that Harry knew about the tournament, Sirius had advised him not to enter, while Lily had told him emphatically that he was not to enter under any circumstances.

In the end, he had decided to enter anyway - he had not done so without a second thought, as he might have done when he first started Hogwarts, but he had decided to disregard them nonetheless. Harry had aspirations for his future - big ones, which could only be helped by the notoriety of having participated in the Triwizard Tournament.

His parents’ disapproval would not dissuade him from his dreams. Plus, if he were being honest with himself, he really didn’t want to let Fred or George, the next most obvious choices after himself in his opinion, have the glory.

“Course,” Cassius agreed easily, biting off another mouthful of pork. Harry was about to start on his own plate, when he noticed Archer’s - it was entirely comprised of dessert.

“Real food, you dolt. If you think I’m going to let you stuff yourself full of eclairs and vomit on my robes again you’ve got another thing coming,” he chastised, waving his wand and sending everything on her plate back where it had come from.

“That was one time,” Archer muttered, but made no move to reach for the dessert again - instead, she grabbed a bowl of soup and some bread, which the table seemed to have provided specifically for her, as Harry could not see any more of it anywhere on the table. That was one of the things he liked about Archer - when he told her something that was in her own best interest, she listened to him.

Adhara would push and shove against him until she saw with her own eyes that what he was saying was for her own good, Charlie would just ignore him flat-out and the twins would do the exact opposite just to piss him off; Archer didn’t do that. If what he was saying made sense, she would listen to it, even if she didn’t like it. He knew that probably had something to do with being told what do regardless of her feelings on the matter by healers since she was old enough to listen, but he was still grateful for it nonetheless.

Harry dropped the ten galleons Cassius had given him in front of Archer, whose eyes widened at the clattering of the coins against the table.

“For being my favourite sibling,” he said with a wink, before turning back to his food - he had assembled himself a Sunday roast, which he attacked with great gusto.

He polished his food in short time, and talked Quidditch with Cassius until he was satisfied that Archer had eaten enough, at which point he looped her into the conversation.

“So, what was with that Sorting, Archer? I think nine minutes might be some sort of record - they say Merlin himself only took seven,” he said conversationally, but loud enough for the people around to hear - he wasn’t going to miss out on the chance to bolster his sister’s reputation if he could help it.

“I was arguing with the hat. It wanted to put me in Ravenclaw, but I wanted to be in Slytherin. Everything I said it kept trying to flip in favour of me being in Ravenclaw, until I said something it seemed to have been waiting for, because then it just immediately decided I was a Slytherin,” she explained, ladling the last of her soup into her mouth,

“Why did you want to be in Slytherin?” he asked, rather intrigued by that development. If anything, he would have expected her to be arguing for Gryffindor - it was, after all, where both of her parents had been sorted, and she would be with Charlie and Adhara. There hadn’t been a Potter in Slytherin for nearly two hundred years if memory served - there had to be some sort of catalyst.

“Viridian Potter was a Slytherin, and she’s my coolest ancestor. I want to be like her,” she said, reaching for another, smaller bowl of soup which had just appeared in front of her. Harry shook his head in amusement, wondering why he had expected anything different - he had spent six minutes arguing with the Sorting Hat to put him in Slytherin purely because he knew it would stir the pot; a return to form for House Black, and all that malarkey.

“Plus, dad would get annoyed if someone wrote him and said I was hanging around you a lot if I wasn’t in Slytherin. At least now I have an excuse,” she added more quietly, which instantly soured his good mood. 

“Your dad has problems,” Harry grumbled, reaching for a goblet of pumpkin juice. It was a testament to how irrational Archer found her father’s treatment of Harry that she didn’t offer a retort to that - James Potter was her hero in all other regards. Harry shook his head to clear his mind, downing his pumpkin juice in one.

“I got your letter, by the way. Are you sure you want to meet Sirius? James’ll be furious if he finds out,” he warned, and did not feel like he was being unfair in saying so. Whatever hatred James had for Harry, it had evidently been inherited from Sirius - sins of the father, and all that. Harry was absolutely certain that James was one of the two mystery Marauders that Sirius refused to name, but he had no concrete proof, so he would have to keep that one to himself for now.

Still, whatever the case, he knew James would not react well if he found out that his daughter had met Sirius Black - Harry would still arrange the meeting if Archer really wanted it, but he just couldn’t see why, when there was so much risk involved.

“Because they’re hiding something. Our parents, that, is,” she clarified, fairly unnecessarily in Harry’s opinion. “I think Sirius is the weakest link. If we’re both there to pressure him, he might tell us the truth,” she said.

Harry had nothing to say to that, so he simply stayed silent, offering a nod in response as he thought it over. He would have liked to protest that his dad was not the weakest link, but he couldn’t really argue otherwise - Lily and James both had experience controlling the narrative with Harry and their own kids. Sirius had never met any of the Potter children, and thus he was the one they were most likely to catch wrong-footed if they questioned him.

He couldn’t say the idea of gaming his own father for information like this was appealing to him, but he wasn’t a Slytherin for nothing - he would do it if he meant he could figure out what in Merlin’s name was up with his bizarre family.

“You’re full of surprises, little Potter,” Cassius cut in, causing Archer to jump and Harry to look up - he had rather forgotten Cassius was there, if he was honest with himself.

“H- how so?” she stuttered, looking intimidated by the older boy. Harry couldn’t say he blamed her - Cassius was a hulking figure, and must have seemed some kind of titan to Archer, small as she was.

“For a Potter, you act awfully like Black here,” he said, nodding in Harry’s direction. Try as they might, they could not get him to elaborate on that statement - he simply returned to his food, and said nothing more on the matter throughout the rest of the Feast, leaving Harry and Archer to wonder what on earth he had meant.

“You come out with some absolute shite sometimes. You know that, Cass?” Harry finally relented, exasperated, after his needling had produced no clarification. Cassius just shrugged, heaping what must have been fourth helpings onto his plate.

“I’m always right, though. You’ll see soon enough.”

Not long after that ominous pronouncement, the Feast drew to a close and the Slytherins made the walk back to the dungeons. As Harry reclined on his favourite sofa and watched Snape swoop into the room in a swirl of robes to deliver his customary speech to the first years, he couldn’t help but think that he was in for a very eventful year.