The first day the brat had cried continuously. Calling for it's parents until Petunia had finally snapped and yelled “They're dead! They’re not coming!” And had shoved the child into the cupboard under the stairs just to get its snotty crying face away from her. She'd quickly peered through the windows to make sure none of the neighbours had seen. Fortunately, it was November and the weather was miserable, which meant no nosey nellies pretending to prune their bushes while they really peered into their neighbours gardens and windows.
She could still hear it crying, so she went into the living room where Dudley was in his play pen sitting happily in front of the TV. She turned the volume up. “Good boy, Diddums. Aren’t you an angel?” She cooed to her son, flattening down the tuft of blonde hair on his head.
The crack made her heart leap in her chest and bound madly against he rib cage. She lunged towards Dudley, while turning to face where the noise had come from. Only to see the red, crying face of her stupid sister’s brat bawling on the clean sofa. She muttered about having to get a lock for the cupboard door, as if the boy had simply opened the door and walked out of it. No matter that he was too short to reach the handle. Yes, that was what had happened.
The second day the boy was still refusing food. So now , Petunia was refusing to feed it. It had cried all night and Petunia was feeling cross and tired. Dudley was yet to sleep through the whole night but he only needed feeding and then he would go straight back to sleep. Petunia had taken the boy back down to the cupboard, the basket he had arrived in was in there. She dropped the boy into it and shut the door. Upstairs she hadn’t been able to hear the crying anymore, not over Vernon’s snoring and Dudley guzzling his third feed of the night.
The boy hadn’t been in the cupboard when they had come down for breakfast. He had been sat just outside it. Crying. Vernon had stepped over it. “Shut it up!” was all he had snapped.
By lunch time, the brat had stopped crying and was just following her around moaning and asking “Mama, Dada...” and other words that sounded like “Moomy, padoo, peep” which made no sense. But this was no less annoying. This time when she shoved the boy in the cupboard she pushed a chair up under the handle and went to lie down upstairs while Dudley had his nap.
The crack startled her awake and there was the boy. Red in the face and screaming bloody murder sat on the bed beside her.
Day four, the boy appeared outside the house. Petunia heard the crack and had to rush out of the house in the pouring rain and grab the child before any of the neighbours saw. She was furious when she came back in. “Stay in the cupboard!” she hissed through her teeth before plonking him back inside without drying him. It was his own fault he was wet.
Day five and Petunia was starting to feel like she was losing her mind. She didn’t like to think of her childhood or her sister, but she had racked her brains for memories of her sister doing magic as a child and what her parents might have done to contain it. Magic was a stupid , useless ability in adults but in children it was absurd. How did they keep their spawn from popping up all over the place? Maybe they had magical containers for them.
The boy had appeared on the kitchen side, in the fridge, and in the bath tub while Vernon was bathing.
The worst time was when he had appeared in Dudley’s cot, scaring the little life out of her sweet Didums, who had cried and pushed the boy, who then made that cracking sound and was inexplicably outside the cot. Dudley had been inconsolable. She’s had to give him two bottles of milk, a whole packet of chocolate buttons and three biscuits before he would calm down again.
Day six, the crack had just happened and the boy was sat in front of Petunia looking up at her with petulant eyes, when a breaking news programme came on the TV. Petunia was considering whether to lock the boy in an old dog crate Marge had left at their house, when he suddenly stood and his face turned from miserable to filled with joy. The boy waddled to the TV.
“This is the face of Mass Murderer, Sirius Black. Police Spokesman Detective Graham Moor of the homicide department reported earlier today that they had made an arrest in the gas bomb tragedy...”
“Padoo!” The boy cried, and tapped his hands against the screen of the TV.
Petunia was going to have to write a letter. That Dumbledorn fellow was going to have to come back and take him away. The crying, the refusing to eat and the just appearing out of thin air were already too much but this delight at seeing a Murderer... what did that say about the boy? Too dangerous to be around Dudley, that’s what it said. She had known it from the minute she found the boy on her doorstep. But now... he had to go. She was just getting up to fetch pen and paper when with a crack, the boy was gone.
Petunia searched the house. The garden. The shed. He was gone. He could be out in the neighbourhood somewhere, Petunia supposed. But how would they link the brat to her? He was still wearing the clothes he had arrived in. He looked everything like his horrid father and nothing like Petunia. They couldn’t. Maybe they should move.
The wind was howling through the cracks, the cold stabbed through his thin clothing like it didn’t exist. Sirius was hunched in a ball. He could feel the cold sort of. It was nothing compared to the cold in his chest filling the void where his chosen family had once been. The creeping feelers of the Dementors in his mind, their dark magic prying into every corner of his brain. The image of James, his brother, his soul's twin, drained of colour, drained of life- cold and stiff on the floor staring at him with unseeing eyes. Betrayal.
A crack might have echoed through the cells if the prisoners unnatural screams weren’t already reverberating throughout. One minute, Sirius’ vision was filled with James’ accusatory stare, the next he was looking into Lily’s eyes- red rimmed and welling with tears. When the crying started , Sirius reacted on instinct. He knew it was a figment of his worst thoughts. Harry alone in the world, crying for his family and none there for him. He reached for the image and was shocked when his fingers touched warm skin, when the weight of the child settled into his arms and then the damp face pressed into the crook of his neck, his little fingers tangling themselves in Sirius’s hair like he had always done, tugging slightly on the ends. Sirius was unsure how long it took for the his broken mind to piece together the clues. To figure out that the cold he now felt was just from the weather, that the image of James in his mind was one that he himself was fixating on rather than one being forced upon him, that the weight in his arms was warm and crying and saying his name “Padoo. No Mama. No Dada. Bad mama. No bad mama. Harry Padoo.”
“Harry”, Sirius croaked, unable to align the cell, the screaming prisoners, the rattling wind and his godson being there, “Harry, you’re here!” He held the child away from him slightly. He looked thin and pale, his eyes were red rimmed and blood shot, the cut on his head looked sore and swollen. He cried harder.
“No bad mama! No bad mama!” He screamed.
“No bad mama,” Sirius repeated, feeling slightly dazed and pulling the child back to him, “I don’t understand...”
It was then, looking up from his godson that he noticed the stag, luminescent, tall and proud , pacing backwards and forwards across the bars of his cell.
“Prongs?! James?!” Sirius cried , lurching upwards.
“No bad mama!” Harry cried, his arms and legs tightening around Sirius’ torso. “Padoo.”
“James?” Sirius said again, before his eyes and his brain and everything seemed to start clearing of fog and he recognised the apparition. “A patronus.”
Sirius stepped closer to the bars to peer into the hallway to see if he could see who was casting it.
“Lily?” he called. The stag came and stood before him and Sirius felt something cracking inside him. He never thought he would see Prongs again. “Hello,” he said quietly, reaching out a hand.
“Padoo!” the stag patronus spoke. Sirius jumped backwards, his heart hammering in his chest. Feeling bewildered he looked down at Harry, who was looking up at him with big, wet, green eyes.
“OK. OK. OK. I’m in Azkaban. I’m in Azkaban, with my godson... who can apparate and produce a full corporeal patronus..at 1. Facts. Those are the facts.”
“Padoo yumyum?”
“Harry, oh Harry,” He squeezed the boy to him, “I don’t have any yumyum.”
“Moomy ha’ yumyum?”
“Moomy have yumyum,” Sirius repeated , because he was confused and he couldn’t seem to pull together a coherent thought. Azkaban. Harry. Patronus. His mind was circling around these words like they were meant to make sense ... but they just wouldn’t.
“Moomy yumyum! Harry yumyum! Padoo, yumyum?”
“Yes... yes , yumyums.” What should he do? Alert someone? How? Who? He couldn’t give Harry to a dementor! He couldn’t keep Harry in the cell! As Harry was so cleverly pointing out, Sirius did not have the things to support a baby in this cell. And, how long could a 1 year old hold a patronus for?! How would Sirius protect him from the dementors then? And what about the other prisoners... if they found out Harry was here... Sirius could feel his breathing getting shorter and his body rocking backwards and forwards still cradling the child.
“Padoo, Moomy yumyums.”
“I can’t,” he whispered, “ Padfoot stuck.” Harry leaned back slightly then.
“Padoo du?”
“Padfoot stuck.”
The patronus winked out. Sirius instinctively wrapped himself around Harry while filling with terror. The creeping cold tendrils of the dementors magic prying at his mind.
A sucking feeling started to pull at Sirius. He recognised the magic on some instinctive level and twisted into the apparition. Clinging to Harry.
A loud crack pierced the night. Too loud to be covered by the sound of the sea. Remus stood warily. His entire body ached.
He was sitting in the cold of a decrepit little shack, that stood precariously on a cliff top looking out over the grey choppy sea. In the distance, if you looked carefully (and were a witch or wizard) you could see a hazy outline of a jagged rock that jutted out of the waves. Remus didn’t know why he was here. Only that in a matter of days his whole life had come crashing down. James and Lily dead. Peter dead. Sirius... worse than dead. And yet, Remus had come here. To be as close as he could to the only man he had ever loved.
Remus opened the door, casting a lumos and preparing to fight. Sirius sat on the floor, in the wet and the mud, staring at Remus like he had seen a ghost. Remus froze. Half convinced a boggart must be on his doorstep, half wondering whether he should curse him or run to him.
“Remus,” Sirius croaked, “ I.. I... I don’t know what... Remus?”
From Sirius’ chest detached a small figure.
“Moomy!” he cried, beaming at him.
“Harry?! Why do you have Harry?”
Sirius turned his confused expression on the toddler as if just seeing him for the first time.
“I think he rescued me.”
Remus didn’t know what to make of that but Remus lowered his wand. He couldn’t curse Sirius while he held Harry.
He still didn’t know if he wanted to curse Sirius.
“Harry rescued you?”
“Yes. Yes. He can apparate... and do a patronus charm.”
“Moomy, yumyums?”
“He’s hungry.”
Harry left Sirius’ arms and toddled to Remus, holding his arms up to be picked up.
“No Mama, no Dada.” Harry said, sadly, his bottom lip wobbling. Remus felt his grief cracking in his chest. He turned back to Sirius who was still sat on the floor, looking lost and small.
“You killed them,” he said. When he had imagined this scene in his head, he had imagined how he would shout the accusation at Sirius How his rage would be a storm outside of his control. But instead , the words came out empty and emotionless. And in his arms he held the son of his dead best friends.
“NO,” Sirius shouted, rising suddenly reaching out to Remus, “Never.” He said, looking grief stricken, “Never. It was Peter. It was Peter.” And then he was on his knees again, his face in his hands. And Remus didn’t know how to feel. Didn’t know how to deal with a confused, lost Sirius. Sirius was always wild and passionate and so sure. Not sad and lost.
What was Peter?
“MOOMY! YUMYUMS!” Harry cried, banging his fist against Remus’ shoulders.
Right.
Harry.