Switched

Harry was still in a state of awe when he and Dru arrived at Sirius’s sanatarium in Nice the next morning — more awake and refreshed than he had possibly ever woken up before, but also more...settled? Not buzzing with the need to do something like he normally would be if he were in this good of a mood. Content, maybe? 

Time meant nothing Outside. There was nothing to track the passage of time, not even the processes of his own body, so it felt like a very long time. Or at least, there wasn’t anything else that he had encountered — Dru said that there were other beings and it was possible to explore the tapestry of reality, experience other times and places, he just hadn’t gotten very “far” Outside before he’d been overwhelmed by the sheer bliss of being there and sort of...lost track of himself.

All of which was to say, he had no idea how much “time” he spent “floating around” out there, but it felt like an eternity. Long enough for him to remember that the world existed and wonder what was going on in there, which was about the point when Dru found him and “told” him it was time to go back. (The two events were probably not unrelated.) Somehow, he didn’t know how, exactly, she’d managed to bring them back just about the time normal people would be getting up, half six on the dot. Apparently they could have come back just a moment after they “left”, but she preferred to let her body rest and recuperate while she “slept” Outside. (Harry was pretty sure that that wasn’t what anyone else would call sleeping, but he didn’t have another word for it, and that was what Dru called it.)

Unlike just getting a glimpse of Outside and then being forced back into reality immediately, which had felt cold and dark and miserable, coming back to the universe didn’t seem so bad after spending however much subjective time outside of it. Even though it was the same old world it always had been, it felt like everything was bright and new and different. Like going back to school after summer hols always felt different and much more fun and bearable than it did just before hols started.

He was happier and calmer than he usually was, he thought, but he definitely wasn’t more focused. Everything being bright and new and different meant he kept getting distracted, by everything from the scent of tulips on the breeze to the way the light glinted off a window-pane, to the conversation of passersby as he and Dru meandered through the gardens looking for Sirius. The witch at the front desk had said that he was out here somewhere.

Harry wasn’t really surprised that Dru spotted him first. He was busy looking at the buds of a lime tree, the tiny, perfect leaves just beginning to unfurl, when she pointed him out. 

“Ah. You know, I haven’t made a point of looking in on Sirius since I left the House of Black, but I can’t say I’m honestly surprised,” she said, tipping her head toward a young man sitting cross-legged under an evergreen oak, surrounded by books and scribbling away at a muggle notebook with a biro. He was wearing jeans and a muggle tee-shirt, too, from a Led Zeppelin concert, which was probably what Dru was referring to. Yes, he always was rather rebellious, all the more so after the incident with Orion. 

Incident?

My understanding is that Orion walked in on Sirius telling his younger brother certain details about the Family Yule ritual which he wasn’t old enough to know — children weren’t included until they reached the age of seven, largely because they needed to be old enough to protect knowledge of the ritual with occlumency and keep it a secret outside of the House, which younger children were not trusted to do — and overreacted. Explosively. He began cursing Sirius, entirely out of proportion with the so-called crime — honestly, they could easily have simply obliviated Regulus — Reggie ran to fetch Bellatrix; she and Orion duelled until Arcturus intervened, at which point Orion, quite mad with rage, threw a soul-rotting hex at Sirius, presumably motivated by pure spite. Bellatrix intervened to save his soul, but in so doing, rendered him hypersensitive to dark-polarised magic. 

Oh, that must have been what happened right before the scene the Family Magic had shown him, when Bella had told Walburga to piss off, Sirius was hers, and the Family Magic had been upset that she wasn’t the heir anymore.

Indeed. Walburga, of course, continued insisting that he learn dark magic — it would have been extremely shameful if her so-very-talented son suddenly became unable to cast polarised spells — but constantly channelling dark magic made it impossible for the soul-wounds to heal properly, so he remained overly-sensitive to it and became more and more openly rebellious over being forced to practise such spells anyway. Embracing a muggle aesthetic when he gained a degree of independence, and one I believe is somewhat counter-cultural even among muggles, is very much in keeping with the trajectory he had set for himself even before I left the House.

“Good morning, Sirius,” she added aloud as they approached. 

Sirius looked up at his name, then yelped and scrambled to his feet. “Ah! Auntie Dru? What are you— Oh, right, you’re his guardian. Well, better you than me. Gods, kid, you really do look a lot like me at your age— And it is Nineteen Ninety -Two, isn’t it? Not Seventy-Two? I mean, I know I’ve been having a few moments lately, but you look exactly the same, and that is not helping.”

He eventually stopped talking, pinned against the tree by Dru’s unimpressed, vaguely disapproving stare. “Would you like to try that again, Sirius? Perhaps with some small degree of the dignity a Lord is generally expected to display?”

He took a deep breath, glaring at her. Harry couldn’t read his mind, but he was betting he was thinking something along the lines of damn it, Dru, I’m not twelve years old anymore! And Iam Lord Black, so however I act is how a Lord acts, got it?! But then he said, “Good morning, Auntie,” with a somewhat overly dramatic bow, which even Harry could tell was sarcastically overdone. “How are you this fine day? And I suppose this must be...Harry.”

“Yeah, hi. Dru’s been calling me ‘James’ since I’m going to be switching to that eventually, but either one’s fine.” The way Sirius had hesitated there, Harry would bet ten galleons he’d been thinking it was weird to call Harry by his godson’s name. He hadn’t quite gotten used to James yet, still thought of himself as Harry, but that was probably just as well, since everyone at school was still calling him Harry. James was fine, though. “What are you working on?”

“Ah...right. James. You may have heard, I recently committed to starting a bloody school? I may have slightly underestimated how complicated a project that’s going to be. Just by...quite a lot, actually,” he muttered, sweeping up the books with a silent charm and shoving them into a leather satchel that looked like it had seen better days.

“Were you not in contact with Mirabella’s office while in the process of negotiating your demands?”

“Well, yes, and let me tell you, it is absolutely surreal that Zee is a Ministry Director now. But we didn’t really talk about the details, as such. You know, courses and instructors and all that. Not to mention, where are we going to put it? I mean, I just got the survey results back, and we’re talking about eight-hundred kids whose families would be interested, Levels One through Nine. I figured, start with primary and OWL courses, maybe work our way up to NEWTs and Mastery programmes. Closer to twelve -hundred, if we can keep them for the week and just send them home weekends, rather than a day-school. I didn’t even know there were twelve-hundred children in Britain!”

“There was a bit of a population rebound after the end of the war,” Dru noted. “And I expect your survey is underestimating it by at least a few hundred.”

“Yeah, that’s what Max said. People who don’t think it’s really going to happen, or think there’s got to be some sort of a catch, or will weigh their options when the time comes and decide that we look better than the other day-schools, even if we are expecting their children to study alongside upyri and the occasional wilderfolk. They didn’t seem too interested, honestly — the wilderfolk, that is — but I don’t know how much of that was just that they didn’t want to talk to the blokes doing the survey. Strangers asking nosey questions, you know.”

Dru nodded. “I would suggest that you coordinate with Christensen, Wellsey, O’Connell, and Blake — you will be cutting into their student-base, I expect at least one of them will be willing to consider integrating with your school, rather than attempt to compete with you — and speak to Olympe Maxime at Beauxbatons as well regarding the structure of their programmes and the logistics of boarding students.”

Sirius nodded. “Cheers. But enough about me and my problems. Tell me about yourself, Jimmy.” 

Harry made a face. “I don’t strike myself as a Jimmy, for one thing. Jay is fine, I guess, if I have to have a nickname.”

“You do, because every time I hear ‘James’, I think of Jamie Potter. I’m supposed to be trying to avoid shite that triggers flash-backs to Azkaban and the circumstances of my ending up there. Jay, then.” He sounded a lot happier saying that than he had saying ‘Ah, right...James, ’ a minute ago. “So what’s your life story? Just, you know, start at the beginning. You mentioned in your letter you grew up with Lily’s sister? Tall, skinny, sort of long face, tendency to look like she’s just bitten a lemon when the subject of magic comes up?”

“Yeah, that’s Aunt Petunia.” Harry smirked, imagining her reaction to that particular description. “Did you once ask her to go for a ride on a flying motorbike?” She’d admitted as much when Harry asked if she knew anything about the bloke Snape thought was his father. 

Sirius hesitated, frowning. “I don’t specifically recall doing so, but I do have to admit, that sounds like a thing I would do.”

“So, you actually have a flying motorbike? How cool is that!”

“Well, not anymore. I let Hagrid take it when I went off hunting Pettigrew. He was one of the founding members of the Order of the Phoenix, used to be the gamekeeper at Hogwarts, dunno if he’s still around.” 

“He is.”

Sirius nodded. “But yeah, it was sweet, dude. I’ll have to look into getting another one, see if I can find any of my notes — it was my NEWT Runes project, prof was appalled. Good times.”

“Wicked!”

“When you have finished with your father-son bonding time, you’ll find me in the library,” Dru announced.

“ Ugh, Auntie,” Sirius whined. “Don’t call me that. You know I’m not father material.”

“I hate to break it to you, Sirius, but the only person in the entire House of Black who was actually suited to parenthood was Walburga, and she still made a hash of it with you, so I can’t say I see what difference that makes. Until later,” she said firmly, gliding away without giving them an opportunity to respond.

“Okay. You have got to tell me how the hell that happened,” Sirius said, shooting a dirty glare at her back.

“What?”

“Dru. Being your guardian. She hates children. And quite honestly I’d expect raising one Bellatrix to be enough for anyone. I mean, I was no angel, but everyone said she was worse. And frankly I’m surprised you didn’t beg me to take your guardianship as soon as you heard I was out. I mean, really. Have you met her? She’s an absolute harpy...”

“I’m told I’m much better behaved than Bella when she was my age because Aunt Petunia wasn’t nearly as awful as Cygnus, and Dru is better prepared to handle a certain degree of chaos in her life now than she was thirty years ago. Also, she might hate Dumbledore more than she hates kids. And yes, obviously I’ve met her. I like her, she’s great!”

“Uh- huh,” Sirius said sceptically, leading the way down a path, apparently at random. That was fine, Harry would rather walk and talk than sit and talk any day. “Not sure I buy that — seriously, she used to make Narcissa cry in lessons — but if you say so...”

“No, really. We’re going to speak a different language every week over the summer, and she’s going to let me join a duelling club, and when I got to her flat, she was out, so she left a book on security spells with the doorman as a hint that I should just try to break in. Which I didn’t manage, because I didn’t know how to imitate someone else’s magical signature, but I’m getting it. She made me a little puzzle thing to practise with. And she knows all sorts of neat things, like we went spirit walking Outside last night, which was amazing...”

The conversation meandered through a dozen different topics as they wound their way around the gardens. Harry’s overall impression was that Sirius was easily distracted and excitable (though it wasn’t like Harry had any room to talk) and fun to talk to, laughing and animated as he talked about the trial and told stories about the war. He pretty clearly wasn’t really trying to avoid anything that reminded him of it too much, though Harry still let him call him Jay. And he was pretty good at not making the conversation all about him, asking Harry about Hogwarts and his friends and stuff, too.

He did get serious though (no pun intended) when they finally started talking about the Family Magic, and how Sirius should ditch the spa and come recover at home, and also let it invest itself in him, because Harry was sure that even if they weren’t actually dying anymore, it would still feel better with a stronger connection to a living adult mage to sort of...anchor it. He didn’t think he entirely understood how the Family Magic was supposed to work, but the impression he’d gotten was that normally, before the House fell, it had sort of shared the life-force or soul or something of the Head of the House, who sort of constantly channelled magic into it to support it — every member of the House did, too, but the Head of the House put in significantly more and acted as a sort of focus...somehow? he thought? — and was bound to it closely enough that he could use the collective magic of the Family to do really powerful wizardry in certain circumstances — usually defending the House — but he had to be able to channel a certain amount of magic on a constant basis in order to support it without it burning him out...or something.

Anyway, it didn’t really matter exactly why the Family Magic needed (in a less urgent, could wait until Harry came into his power or Bellatrix left Azkaban and came back to them if it really had to -way) to invest itself in a human host/Head, it just mattered that Harry couldn’t do it (yet) because he couldn’t channel enough magic to support it. Sirius definitely could, though.

He just didn’t want to.

“But why not?” Harry demanded, confused and annoyed. As best he could figure, it didn’t really hurt the Head of the House in any way to be the Head. If he was constantly channelling magic into the Family Magic, maybe he wouldn’t be able to channel quite as much into really powerful curses, Harry guessed, but how often did Sirius actually need to cast that big of a spell? And if he did, the Family Magic would help him, Harry was pretty sure. There was no reason he shouldn’t want to help the Family, either. Sure, maybe he’d wanted to get shot of them before, during the war, but everyone he’d hated was dead now!  

Sirius groaned, swiping his hair away from his face to get a better look at Harry. “Look. Jay. It’s not— How much do you know about me and my relationship with the House, anyway?”

Harry glowered up at him. “I know you broke the Covenant, and the Dark left us, and that hurt us. I know you ran away as a teenager and lived with the Potters—” That had been in the papers, part of the shite that came up in relation to his trial. James’s mother had been Sirius’s godmother, apparently. “—and you and Bella were on opposite sides in the war. I’m not really sure why —”

“Because de Mort was fucking evil, that’s why!” Sirius interrupted.

“Yeah, but besides that.”

“What, like not wanting to follow an evil lunatic into a war over whether it’s cool for him to get his rocks off torturing and murdering people isn’t a good enough reason, just in and of itself?”

“Maybe it would be, but it wasn’t just about that, and you know it!” They hadn’t really talked about the killing Voldemort project yet, but Dru had let Harry see some of her memories of the early days of the Revolution and the person de Mort had been before he’d started being affected by Lily’s tynged. He’d been a charming bastard and used mind magic to make people like him, too, but Harry was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to get a whole Revolution going if it was just about him being a queer, snake-obsessed serial killer, as Dru had put it on Christmas, and the Ministry having a problem with that. 

“It was about the Light curtailing the freedom to practise whatever magic people wanted to practise and trying to degrade the autonomy of Houses—” both Noble and Common “—and adopting all the worst parts of muggle society, like bureaucracy and shite, and using the Statute and protecting muggles as an excuse to force other species into smaller enclaves and monitoring and trying to control them.” Granted, most of the Death Eaters had probably been more concerned about shite like Azkaban existing and the Ministry forcing all the hags out of muggle cities and into the shite parts of magical settlements like Knockturn, not whether centaurs could travel without a Ministry official accompanying them or whatever, but still.

“ Plus,” and this point was perhaps the most important, “the Death Eaters sound like they were a hell of a lot more fun than the Light.”

Sirius laughed at him, like he wasn’t entirely serious about that. “Yeah, alright. You got me. It was personal. It was...” He hesitated, apparently uncertain where he wanted that sentence to go. “I left the House when I was sixteen, you know. Well, I know you know, you did just say that, didn’t you. Did Druella tell you why?”

“Er...no?”

Sirius shrugged. “She might not know, she fucked off back here when I was about nine, I guess. Whatever year Bella killed Cygnus. I wasn’t at Hogwarts yet, I do know that. Alright. Quick Quotes version?”

Harry shrugged. “Sure.”

“Okay. So I was designated the heir of the House when I was three. Lammas. I promised that I would step into the role of the Head of the House if called upon to do so, provide a haven for the Magic and ensure the continuation of the House at all costs. That’s cutting it down quite a lot, but. I wouldn’t have been able to do it at the time, obviously, let the Magic possess me. It would’ve burned me out for sure. So it was really just...appointing me to kick Bella out of the job, I’m pretty sure. Thirteen is definitely old enough for a First Daughter to start being a real pain in the arse for the adults of the House, especially when that thirteen-year-old was Bellatrix. 

“Whatever. So I was the heir, and pretty much everything they could possibly have wanted me to be — I was a little monster, honestly. They — my parents, the other adults of the House — they encouraged cruelty, violence, and selfishness. Narcissa moved in with us when we were five. Walburga positively doted on her, the daughter she’d never had. She and I spent most of our childhood sharpening our claws on each other — competing at everything and carrying on this feud, I don’t even remember what started it. I do remember that I didn’t remember even when I started school, so that’s not an Azkaban thing, just, we were kids and we hated each other, probably over something childish at first, and then for hundreds of pranks and retaliatory curses and vicious, hard-fought duels, playing rough edging over into this really isn’t fun anymore, but obviously neither of us was going to give up, so.

“The Yule I was seven, Orion tried to kill me — the reason’s not really important—” and Harry already knew it anyway, so he didn’t ask “—and Bella used some crazy dark soul-magic to save me, and kind of made me really sensitive to dark magic while she was doing it, which sucked because I was a natural at magic, and dark-polarised shite especially, and because the heir of the House obviously couldn’t refuse to learn dark battlemagic and Family rituals for so petty a reason as my soul is burning. So I started hating and resenting my mother — most of the House, honestly, but Walburga especially, since she was usually the one forcing me to practise dark magic when it fucking hurt — and growing closer to Bella, because she went out of her way to teach me magic that wasn’t dark- polarised but could still be used darkly — all the fun little torture curses and duelling spells and shite I thought was so cool when I was a kid. 

“Honestly, I spent a lot of time with the kids and younger siblings of a lot of the Death Eaters before I started school. Really honestly, I was still hanging around with them during the summers until I was...I dunno, fifteen? Crashing their training camps and war games and shite. Because I knew it was wrong and they were evil, but it was fun, and I needed to blow off steam once in a while or I’d lose my thrice-cursed mind. I probably would’ve ended up in the Death Eaters if the Sorting Hat hadn’t let me go to Gryffindor instead of Slytherin. 

“I asked because I couldn’t stand the thought of sharing a common room with Narcissa for six years, and I’d just met Jamie Potter, who was everything I wanted to be, and he was definitely going to be a Gryffindor. Great reasons, I know. But it got me away from practically everyone I knew before Hogwarts and I made new friends and they started introducing me to lighter ideas and I wanted to be nothing like my family, so I adopted them wholeheartedly...at least when they were there to remind me that I shouldn’t like Bella and my old, pre-Hogwarts set. They didn’t know I was still hanging around with the Death Eaters over summers. They wouldn’t have understood that I could play games with these people a few weeks out of the year, and still be absolutely willing to cut their heads off in a real fight, if the war was still going on when we left school and joined the aurors.”

...Harry didn’t get it. “This might be one of those I don’t have any common sense questions, but...why not?” If they were on opposite sides of a war...

“Why wouldn’t I hesitate, or why wouldn’t they understand?” Sirius asked, sounding nearly as confused as Harry.

“The second one, obviously.” Not hesitating when someone was trying to kill you seemed like the obvious thing to do...

“ Not obviously when you say this might be an I don’t have any common sense question. I mean, not hesitating in a fight for your life is pretty fucking common sense if you ask me,” the older wizard grumbled. 

“ I don’t have any common sense questions are, you know, questionably-sane demon child questions that I have to ask sometimes because other people just get it and I really, really don’t,” Harry clarified.

“Ah, right. Those questions,” Sirius said, with a far-away look that suggested to Harry that he was thinking of similar questions he’d had to ask normal people after growing up in the House of Black. His reluctance to come home and support the Family Magic aside, Sirius, Harry had found, was very relatable. He had absolutely no trouble believing that his “Cool Uncle” had also been a questionably-sane demon child.

“So, why wouldn’t they understand? I mean, you just said it yourself, not letting someone kill you is about as common sense as it gets, right?”

“Er. Because most people would hesitate to kill someone they were sort of friends with, even if they weren’t very good friends? Or former comrades-in-arms or training buddies or whatever.”

“If you say so...” He guessed he could see maybe hesitating to kill Blaise, for example, but he didn’t think he would ever be in a position where he would have to kill Blaise. It wasn’t like they were likely to end up in enemy armies, somehow. Presumably if they did, he would have had time to get used to the idea that Blaise was the enemy now, anyway. If everyone involved was aware that they were just “sharpening their claws on each other” (which was a great phrase), he wasn’t really sure that counted as friends in the first place, either, but whatever.

“Yeah. They have an even harder time believing that you wouldn’t hesitate to kill family if they were trying to kill you, but I learned that lesson when I was fifteen,” he added bitterly. At Harry’s questioning little eh? he added, “Bella used the Cruciatus on me in the middle of a family dinner. Yule. For calling de Mort a lunatic and telling her she should burn in hell for the Kensington raid — they killed children in a primary school — and that swearing herself to de Mort was the worst decision she’d ever made. I didn’t believe she would actually do it, you know. Right up until she actually cast it. And then I didn’t believe it would actually hurt until it hit me. I just stood there like an idiot because we were family, and we actually liked each other, even if we did disagree about politics and, well. You have to mean your Unforgivables.” He shrugged, staring down at the grass with a troubled frown as they walked on. “She was the last person I actually liked in the House. The only one I thought actually gave a damn about me.

“Then, seven months later, they made me renew my vows to the House, on pain of being entirely disowned, and... It was clear by that point that I was inevitably going to get kicked out of the House if I didn’t disown myself, and there was nothing left for me there, and if they wanted to force me to participate, fine. I would. But I wouldn’t be bound if I didn’t choose to make my vows freely. It would serve them all right if they forced me to do it and then I turned around and betrayed them and everything they stood for, so...that’s what I did. I disavowed the Dark, breaking the House’s Covenant with it, deliberately undermining the Family Magic— I– I can’t go back. Not after that. And...”

“And?” Harry repeated, considering the revelation that Sirius had hurt them deliberately, and not been attacked or somehow subverted or something, like the Family Magic had thought. It... was damning, but on the other hand, he did seem to feel bad about it, or at least know it had been wrong, and it wasn’t like they had a lot of extra people around and could afford to exile one.

Sirius sighed, stopping to turn and look him in the eye. “I know that you probably don’t get this, it took me years to really see it, but the House of Black is evil, Jay.”

“Yeah, so?” As far as Harry was concerned, ‘evil’ was just a word people like Danny liked to throw around at shite they didn’t like. It didn’t really mean anything.

“ So, that’s a bad thing,” he insisted — earnestly, rather than with the eye-rolling sarcasm of someone who thought Harry was having fun with them. “We— The House, historically, has preyed on humanity, profited from the pain and exploitation of others, we literally sacrificed people for our own benefit. And that’s... It’s just wrong. Even if the Family Magic would take me back and it wouldn’t hurt like hell to have its magic bound so closely to mine — I don’t know if you’ve realised this, but the Family Magic is really fucking dark —” Harry had noticed. It felt nice. Like home. “—and as far as I know, no one’s come up with a cure for soul-scarring while I was in Azkaban. I mean, I haven’t asked, but the healers said it was impossible to fix when I was a kid.”

“Did anyone ask Dru?” Because Harry had an awfully hard time imagining Dru saying anything was really impossible, and Sirius had been a member of her House at the time. Even if he was an annoying child she wanted nothing to do with, he was pretty sure she would’ve been obliged to help him, if she could.

“Why would they have? She’s not a healer. At the time, she wasn’t even an academic, she was just a stuck-up Society bitch who acted like she was better than everyone else all the time.” ...Of course, he could imagine her not volunteering to help if no one asked her to, in much the same way she didn’t want to involve herself directly in the Acromantula Problem. Apparently that was a rhetorical question, because he went on without waiting for an answer. “Anyway, even if that wasn’t an issue and the Family Magic would take me back... I don’t think I can go back to supporting a House that has to kill to survive.”

“What?” Harry scoffed. “So you’d rather we just die?”

Sirius shrugged, refusing to meet Harry’s eyes, turning away, back to the path. “It’s sort of the same calculation as the acromantulae, isn’t it? The very nature and existence of the House puts it in a state of direct conflict with the normal, human society we’re technically a part of. What’s worse? You and I and the House dying, or however many people we have to sacrifice to keep it and ourselves alive? Sure it’s easy to say that the survival of the House is paramount, but we’re talking about people here. People who have every bit as much of a right to live as we do.”

“Um, no. The list Andi gave me was very clear that we get to put our own lives over any number of perfect strangers’ in a life-or-death situation. Which this is.” Maybe not immediately, but that was why Snape and Andi and probably even Mira hadn’t fought him on the issue of whether he should kill someone for the Family Magic over Yule. If he didn’t, it would die, and so would he.

“You... do know that that list isn’t universal, right? There are other moral paradigms, or whatever you want to call them, where sometimes being a good person or not harming others comes before preserving your own life.”

“ What? No! I thought—” He’d thought he’d finally understood morality, damn it! “You can’t just say, oh, wait, sometimes the rules are totally different for no reason at all,” he said, trying not to sound as though he was whinging as he glared up at Sirius.

“Maybe you can’t, but other people can and do. All the time.” He said it entirely straight-faced, but Harry still suspected that he was being mocked.

“I hate other people,” he grumbled. “And if you can say sometimes other things are more important, why can’t I say that this isn’t one of those times?”

Sirius chuckled. “Well, you can, but trying to force other people to accept your moral code and deciding whose rights are more important than whose are the kind of things that wars are fought over. Weren’t you just telling me about the acromantulae at Hogwarts needing to be exterminated?” 

He had been. Not at length, because they hadn’t kept to a single topic for more than about two minutes, but it had come up. And then Sirius had said that there had only been a few hundred acromantulae when he was a student — maybe a thousand at most — and Harry had been reminded that he used to run around the Forest as a dog, and he’d had to ask about becoming an animagus, because that was so freaking cool, if not quite as cool as being a metamorph, and then they’d gotten distracted talking about Dora and her general awesomeness.

“In this case, we’re the acromantulae.”

“ No, if we were acromantulae, you wouldn’t be questioning if it’s better to keep sacrificing people or just die.” Harry was pretty damn sure that no matter how much Aragog wanted to get along with his neighbours, if they had the choice of letting the Colony die out or going to war with the centaurs and wilderfolk, he and every other acromantula would choose to go out fighting. “Because that is the choice, here. We kill or we die, full stop,” he added, wondering why he didn’t feel more certain about that. Whatever. He shook it off. “Maybe you didn’t feel it, locked up in Azkaban and as weirdly light and distant as you are, but we were starving to death and we were scared and we don’t want to die.”

“I don’t either. Well, today, at least. I’m just saying...I don’t know that I want to be a part of the House if those are our only options, much less take over as the Head of the House. I don’t want to have to make that choice once, much less every year from now until I die. Not that I think the Family Magic would really want me, anyway...” 

Sirius kept babbling on about the Family Magic not wanting anything to do with him, if it had any idea what he’d done to it, how selfish he’d been (which was complete dragonshite — there were exactly three living members of the House, and Bella was still in Azkaban, it wasn’t in a position to be picky), but Harry wasn’t really listening, because ‘that is the choice, here,’ hadn’t sounded quite... true even as he’d said it, and he’d just had a thought: “Maybe those don’t have to be the only options?”

“Eh?”

“Dumbledore’s trying to give the acromantulae another option, and Dru is going to make sure he succeeds so they have a choice other than starvation or war, even if it’s sort of a shite choice, whatever he comes up with.”

“Wait, what? How the hell is she going to...?”

Harry ignored the question because he was trying to make a point. “Why can’t we have a choice other than killing or dying, too?” Obviously he hadn’t had a choice with the Family Magic on the verge of starving to death, but they weren’t anymore, the Dark was supporting them now, they had time to figure something else out.

“What, like re-work the wards so they aren’t blood-based anymore, or something?”

“Yes! Exactly like that! We could, couldn’t we?”

Sirius grimaced, eyes tipping upward as he scratched at his head. “Maybe? I mean, I guess the Family Magic would probably go for it, be more secure and less likely to starve to death than relying on sacrifices, at least. I don’t even know where you’d start, though. And even if we could, that doesn’t change my relationship with the Family Magic, and I really don’t think you understand what channelling magic that dark feels like for me. Calling it torture isn’t an exaggeration, especially if I’m keeping it up long enough to cast more than a single spell or two. And my magic is polarised light now. Can the Family Magic even use me as a focus? I mean, we’re barely in contact anymore...”

“Okay,” Harry said, counting off points on his fingers. “A, if you apologise, I’m sure the Family Magic will forgive you. Mostly because I’m eleven, and Bella’s still in Azkaban. It doesn’t have a lot of options.” Sirius seemed ready to question this for a moment, but then shrugged and nodded, accepting the argument that the Family Magic might, in fact, be desperate enough at the moment to let him come home. “B, I don’t know where we would start either, but I’m sure we could figure it out. C, even if it can’t use you as a focus and you’re weird and light now, you’re still part of the Family, and we won’t know until we try, will we? And D, I’ll believe it’s impossible to heal whatever’s wrong with your magic when Dru says it’s impossible.”

“Seriously, kid? I know she’s a bloody genius, and apparently a seer or whatever — that explains so much, by the way, honestly I always thought she was just a bit of a spaz — but she’s not a healer, much less a mind-healer with a speciality in soul-magic.”

“Come on, you have to at least talk to her,” Harry insisted, grabbing him by the wrist and towing him, still complaining (but not making a very strong effort to actually resist), back toward the main building, the one they’d floo’d to, with the reception area and healers’ offices and presumably the library where Dru had been planning to wait for them.

“What on Earth are you talking about, James?” Druella said, as soon as he finished explaining Sirius’s reluctance to just come home and asking if it was really impossible to fix his magic. “There’s nothing wrong with Sirius’s soul. Well, aside from the canine elements, but they’re clearly fully integrated and there’s no dissonance to speak of, so I wouldn’t call that particular alteration wrong. Unusual, certainly, but not detrimental.”

“Canine elements?”

“Yeah, we did a ritual after we got the animagus transformation down, something Jamie found in his family’s library, to sort of give us the instincts of our animal, make it easier to adjust to moving on four legs and so on. Pretty minor as far as soul-magic rituals go. But, well. I mean, um...no offence, Auntie, but—”

“If you wish to avoid offending me, I suggest you simply not say anything you suspect may be offensive, or at the very least stop stuttering around said comment. Yes, I am aware of the soul-wounds you suffered when Bella burnt that soul-rotting curse out of you. No, I’m not a mind-healer, and I’m aware that the half-dozen specialists Wally dragged you to at the age of seven said there was nothing to be done for you. Obviously they were wrong. It was my opinion at the time that disowning you, adjusting the tenor of your magic, and allowing you to refrain from casting dark spells for a couple of years would have allowed your soul to fully recover, after which you could have been safely adopted back into the House.”

“You— What? ”

“It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion,” Dru said defensively. “It was hardly as though I intended to adjust the tone of your magic myself. Obviously we would have used an attunement ritual. Arcturus, however, refused to disown you in order to facilitate what he considered an entirely mad, altogether too extreme, and potentially traumatic solution to the problem. Not that it matters, you clearly found your way there yourself eventually. I do hope he felt suitably remorseful when he realised that the damage you did to the Family Magic by breaking the Covenant and the inevitable consequence which was the fall of the House could have been avoided had he allowed me to correct the matter when you were a child, but it seems unlikely. He always was remarkably unwilling to take responsibility for the problems he allowed to fester within the House.”

Sirius harrumphed in a very agreeing sort of way. “Hate to break it to you, though: casting dark magic hurt worse after realigning my magic, resistance stress on top of the echo of the soul-burn.”

Dru raised an eyebrow at him like stop being an idiot, Sirius. “I’m sure it did, in the short term. Your connection with the Family Magic was lessened but not significantly blocked, and continuing to practise dark magic intermittently between the initial formation of the wound and the realignment of your magic would have exacerbated the condition. Spending ten years under the dampening effect of the dementors’ aura, however, in addition to the dissonance between your magic and that of the House, clearly gave you enough distance to recover.”

“ Clearly?”

“Yes, clearly. I realise that you can’t see your own soul, but surely one of the healers here is capable of performing a suite of soul analytics to assess your degree of sensitivity to different magical registers. Or you could simply deliberately channel dark magic.”

“I could, but it would hurt.”

“When was the last time you were directly in contact with the Dark?”

Sirius sputtered for several seconds before admitting, “Well, I don’t know. Seventy-Nine? Easter of Seventy-Nine. Glastonbury, I used Death’s Scythe on a couple of giants.”

(Harry was definitely going to have to ask him about that later, because that sounded wicked.)

“The first of June of Seventy-Nine,” Dru corrected him. “When Lily Evans invoked the Dark to save the Longbottom boy’s life.”

“How do you even know about that?” Sirius demanded. “Or the instinct integration ritual, for that matter?!”

Dru waved him off. “I’m a seer, Sirius. Ritualists, as a rule, are hard to see, but that doesn’t preclude knowing specific facts about past events in which they were involved, especially when I’m answering a question of which they are not the primary focus.”

Sirius blinked at her for a whole two seconds. “Is that how you always knew literally everything when we were kids?”

“I don’t know literally everything, Sirius. I can think of several very important things, in fact, of which I was entirely unaware when you were a child. Including that I was a seer. Please focus.”

He pulled a face. “ Fine. June of Seventy-Nine, then. It was terrifying and it felt like being hit with Hoarfrost if Hoarfrost were a soul-magic torture spell, and I wasn’t even channelling it at the time, Evans was.”

Dru gave him a very unimpressed frown. “Sirius, that was almost thirteen years ago, ten of which you spent under heavy dementor suppression, which generally speaking wouldn’t be a good thing, but quite frankly your impulse control and emotional regulation always left something to be desired and they did serve to insulate you from the Family Magic and prevented you from casting any external magic. I may not know everything, but I can see your soul and I can assure you that the wound has healed. Channelling dark magic will be more difficult than when you were a child and possibly uncomfortable due to tonal dissonance, but it won’t induce a hypersensitive reaction. Hold out your hand.”

“ Why? ” he asked suspiciously, even as he did as he was told. 

Dru rolled her eyes. “Why do you think, Sirius?” she drawled, the patterns in the magic around her shifting as she pushed outward with the power that normally glowed just beneath her skin, sparks of silver dancing at her fingertips.

Sirius was just as wide-eyed as Harry, every line of his body tense as though he was considering making a break for it. He held himself in place, though, as the first few sparks fell into his palm, vanishing into his own magic like a drop of water into the ocean. 

He hissed. “Bloody hell that’s sharp.”

“But not soul-burning,” she said. It very clearly wasn’t a question.

Sirius didn’t think so, either. Didn’t even bother addressing it. “How did you—? I mean, it’s been a while, but I know your magic wasn’t that dark...”

“No, the tone of my magic is neutral. Magic this dark has always been within my reach, however, and manifesting an external aura effect in a particular register is really a very basic focusing exercise, Sirius.”

Is it? Show me! Harry begged, holding out a hand as well.

She sent a wave of exasperation crashing over him, the mental equivalent of a dramatic eye-roll, but let a shower of sparks fall on his hand, too, the first few refreshingly cold, like splashing water in his face to wake up in the morning, then several which were altogether too hot, like cooking oil spitting at him, though they didn’t actually leave a mark. 

“It most definitely is not. Deliberately manifesting soulfire at all isn’t even a basic exercise. Neither is mimicking someone else’s magical signature,” he added, giving Harry a pointed look. This had come up in their discussion earlier. Harry had shown him the practice cube. He’d triggered an enchantment to make it spin in place, which was keyed to his magic and had been able to identify two of the others and all of the enchantments — the one to make it levitate was Bella’s magic and one that made it cold was Riddle’s — but he didn’t recognise the triggers for glowing, magnetism, and shrinking, and he hadn’t been able to actually copy the ones he did recognise. “ Actual basics are like, just keeping your magic contained and pre-shaping spells, maybe sensing the tone of someone else’s magic. Bella taught Narcissa and me character-matching and half-casting when we were younger than Jay is now, but that was still after about five years of practising actual basics. I knew other aurors who couldn’t do free conjuration or even the most basic wandless charms when we started Academy.”

Dru’s eyes narrowed in what Harry could only consider a distinctly annoyed expression. “Surely you are not suggesting, Sirius, that I should expect only as much from James as from the average, all-too-mediocre eleven-year-old wizard.”

Sirius let out a genuinely amused bark of laughter. “No, but I am suggesting you not give him a false impression of what normal, human mages are capable of and how they’re likely to react if he goes around acting like they’re incompetent morons because they haven’t been taught that residuals that would impress a bloody Venetian duellist are sloppy and that they absolutely must put mastery-level detail into their transfigurations, and can’t pick up new spells by exposure after seeing them cast a handful of times, much less how they’re likely to react if he tells them, oh, yes, I’ve been teaching myself to mimic other people’s magical signatures for the past couple of days, want to see? or practisingextra-planar astral projection. Don’t tell people that, by the way,” he added, turning to Harry. “The former will almost certainly be taken as evidence of intent to circumvent security wards, most likely for nefarious purposes, as well as just plain disturbing that you can, and the latter might actually be considered an anathema exercise in demonic congress.”

“It’s not,” Dru assured them. “Highly restricted, yes, but I am a qualified historical diviner and analytic arithmancer, licensed to make infernal observations with appropriate safeguards in place.”

“You can get a licence to poke holes in the universe on a whim?” Sirius asked, like he thought that sounded ridiculous...which it admittedly did when he put it like that.

The corner of Dru’s lips twitched in an expression which might almost have been a smirk. “You can get a licence to poke holes in the universe, which I imagine hardly anyone can do on a whim. I’m certain the licensing board didn’t expect me to do so when they granted my petition, but they failed to specify any particular limits on my accessing the Outside directly, and have no viable means of monitoring me as long as my safeguards are uncompromised. Quite frankly, if anyone is able to notice that I’ve been opening portals for what others might consider frivolous reasons, we’ll all have far greater problems to address than whether I’m facing prison time for developing an extra-planar transportation spell or allowing my grandson to experience what is the natural environment of at least half of his soul.”

Sirius laughed again. “You’re terrifying, you know that, right?”

Dru sighed. “ Yes, Sirius, I am aware.” He is right, though, that you should avoid telling people you cannot trust to keep your secrets any details of...most of the magic I intend to teach you, and any other esoteric activities we might engage in, including spirit-walking.

Is Blaise okay? Because Harry didn’t know if he could hide things from Blaise. Legilimency was sort of cheating like that, and he wasn’t really good at playing keep-away with specific memories yet. He could do occlumency well enough to just keep him out entirely, he guessed, but he liked their casual telepathy thing...

That may be an effect of the symbiote, Dru mused. Non-legilimens tend not to enjoy direct, mind-to-mind communication. In any case, yes. Blaise is acceptable, as is Mirabella, though neither of them are likely to understand exactly how unusual certain magics are. Severus, too.

Oh, good, because he probably couldn’t even just keep Snape out if he wanted to.

In fact, you probablyshould keep him apprised of your progress, given that he seems to have been tasked with the unenviable role of more or less managing you at Hogwarts.

...Youdo realise that sounds very much like a reasonnot to tell him anything cool you happen to teach me, right?

I do, yes. I’ll write to him myself to ensure he gets the message, just know that you needn’t concern yourself about hiding your abilities or the progress of any of our exploits from him. You may tell Albus about our progress in hunting down Thom’s horcruxes, but nothing else, and only if he asks. Miss Granger can probably safely be told about most of the magic, but I shouldn’t tell her about the human sacrifice or the progress of our plan to keep Bella in check after she is free of the tynged and leaves Azkaban. Or about your allegiance to the Dark.

We have a plan to keep Bella in check after she’s free? This was the first Harry had heard of any such plan, and his immediate reaction was, he didn’t like it, purely on principle. The Dark wanted her free so she’d stop being boring. Not so Dru could do something to make sure she would keep being boring, just not with dementors.

The Dark knew what it was doing when it advised you to seek my assistance, and I intend to discuss it along with the horcrux situation, tomorrow morning most likely. 

But—

“Are you two doing telepathy without me?” Sirius asked suspiciously, interrupting exactly that. Harry hadn’t noticed that he was watching him unusually closely for the last few seconds. He must have made a face when Dru mentioned keeping Bella in check. Oops. “ Rude. Also, how? You weren’t secretly a legilimens this whole time, as well as not-very-secretly a changeling and the world’s most oblivious seer, were you?”

Dru glared at his impertinence. “Yes, we were speaking telepathically. You will have to excuse me for excluding you because, no, I’m not a legilimens. I can’t identify your mind’s frequency from the outside, I need an actual legilimens to let me in via serial legilimency to make an impression first. As for how, I’ve long suspected that I’m leveraging some aspect of omniglottalism to gain access to the conscious aspects of a mind as well as their unconscious background knowledge, so I suppose I might be able to access a mind and form an impression of it while consciously acquiring a new language. Thom and I didn’t begin experimenting with serial legilimency, however, until after I realised that consciously acquiring a language traumatises the speaker—”

You can use omniglottalism consciously? I thought it was an unconscious talent... At a risk of sounding like Hermione, the books he’d found on magical talents certainly seemed to think it was.

Generally it is. As you may have noticed while studying French with Miss Granger, you unconsciously replicated concepts and vocabulary as she consciously used the language, initially those which were most closely related to the specific words and grammatical structures she was using to express herself, then spreading more deeply into the network of unconscious knowledge and understanding as you continued to interact with her until you reached fluency. 

He...really hadn’t noticed. He’d noticed that sometimes he’d be saying something and know how to say it without ever really learning it, like he randomly understood words in other languages sometimes, but he hadn’t questioned the books’ claims that it was an unconscious talent...because it had happened unconsciously.

“—so I never tried it and can’t say for certain. James’s inability to maintain a connection with another mind he is already familiar with and can tune a thought to match suggests that there may be an element of spirit-walking involved in actually extending and maintaining one’s consciousness outside of one’s own mind-space and natural frequency.”

Sirius pouted at her. “Well, fine. I suppose that answers the question of whether I should demand to be included or not.”

Dru pushed a feeling of exasperation at Harry, though he got the impression it was at least half-directed at Sirius, too. If youpay attention to the process, you can consciously direct it and force it to move more quickly — limited by your ability to comprehend and retain new information — but it tends to drag the process into the target’s conscious awareness as you copy it and overextend their mental resources trying to keep up. Thebest case result is simply that you give them a migraine. Well, I suppose thebest case is that you target a legilimens or an occlumens capable of distancing their own consciousness from your mental ransacking, but mind mages are relatively rare. I’ve only met two who knew a language I didn’t. The theoreticalworst case is permanent damage to the target’s ability to comprehend new information and recall certain types of memories.

“It was nothing concerning you, Sirius. Though I have always found your professed hatred of legilimency to be annoyingly incongruent with your apparent aptitude for the subject. You are allowed to admit that you like communicating via mind magic while maintaining your hatred of mind-healers. The Morrigan knows I do.”

So...don’t do that? Not that he really thought he understood how to in the first place. He was still learning Italian from Blaise, though. He could try to figure out how to pay attention next time they were practising.

Yes, you may practise on Blaise if he agrees to the experiment. If he doesn’t want to, I’ll show you in June because Imay have disregarded, when I issued the language challenge, exactly how aggravating it would be to speak to someone non-fluent for the entire summer, especially since we will be moving on to a new language every time you theoretically begin to reach a reasonable degree of competence. Ido still expect you to continue studying the basics. Just be aware that I will expect you to learn everything youdon’t learn before the end of term the day before we start speaking any given language.

...Is that supposed to be some sort of threat? There was sort of an or else feeling around the idea of continuing to study at school and the consequence of having to learn everything else through magic, but it didn’t really seem like a very good threat if it was supposed to be one, because why wouldn’t he want to basically learn a bunch of languages overnight?

“Who said I’m good at mind magic?” Sirius asked, sounding more confused than anything. “I’m not a legilimens. I’m not even an alien-omniglot-spirit walker non -legilimens. And who said I hate mind-healers, for that matter? I’ve been trying not to tip them off, you know!”

Dru actually smiled at that, radiating amusement. “Do you realise how ironic it is to imply that you think you’re not good at mind magic, and then immediately claim that you’ve been hiding your true emotional state from the half-dozen mind-healers you’ve spoken to since you arrived here?”

It’s not athreat, precisely. The more you already know, the easier and quicker it will be to fill in the gaps and build on your existing knowledge to reach conversational fluency, so how long it will take to finish assimilating the necessary information and how much of a headache you will suffer for it depends on whether you continue to study or not.

Why would it be a headache?

I can teach you Parseltongue before you go back to test how quickly you assimilate new information, but from your memories, youdo get tired when you’re intentionally learning a language. If you continue to push yourself beyond that point, you’ll give yourself a headache. 

“Yes, actually. Shockingly enough I’m no longer eight years old and do occasionally venture into humour more sophisticated than serious-Sirius puns these days. Was it de Mort? It was, wasn’t it?” She nodded. “ Damn it! Now I have to decide whether I’m somewhat proud that he actually said something complimentary about me, or annoyed, because fuck that bastard, I don’t want his approval. If they let you read my file or whatever, have I been hiding my utter loathing for their entire profession successfully? Or are they hiding it from me that they know I hate them and playing me somehow?”

Parseltongue?

It’s a magical language which allows the speaker to communicate with serpents. The two talents form a feedback loop and attempt to force the omniglot to assimilate Parseltongue, and do so rapidly enough that most omniglots are advised to avoid parselmouths for the exact reason that we just discussed.

Just getting a headache didn’t seem like a great reason to not learn a magical snake language, much less go out of one’s way to avoid learning it, but okay...

“If they were manipulating you, would you trust me to tell you?”

“Auntie, from one person who hates these patronising, self-righteous shites to another, I would believe you if you told me that the moon is made of cheese.”

“If I were to tell you that the moon is made of cheese...?” Dru trailed off for a second, then blinked twice and glared at Sirius. “Please don’t make me consider the implications of utter nonsense.” 

Well, now Harry was considering the implications — How many cows would you need to make a cheese the size of the moon? Wait. If it were cheese, would it still be moon-sized and far away, or smaller and closer? What about gravity and tides and shite? Is there a cheese with a density similar to moon-rocks? Because if yes, that wouldn’t necessarily change very much at all, would it?

Don’t make me consider the implications of utter nonsensegoes double for you, James. No, there is not a cheese with a density similar to the moon. The moon is approximately three times as dense as relatively dense cheeses, and the gravitational implications are trivial compared to the geomantic implications, just— No. Irefuse to think about this. Change the subject.

Shite. Now the only thing he could think about was cheese... You put me on the spot and now that’s theonly subject that’s coming to mind!  

She didn’t respond. He suspected that she’d broken off contact in order to avoid his wondering which cheeses were the most dense, and why she knew that off the top of her head. Maybe it was a seer thing? He had been thinking that it sort of sounded like being a seer sucked, but if all you had to do to know some random fact was wonder what the answer was, that actually seemed pretty neat...

“Sorry?” the wizard said, very clearly oblivious to why he should be sorry, even if it was very clear that—

“You should be!”

“Do I want to know why?”

Dru’s glare narrowed further. “Yes, but I don’t want to tell you, because I don’t want to think about it.”

“O... kay? In that case, will you tell me if they let you read my file, and whether I’ve successfully convinced them that I am, in fact, cooperating?”

“Well, let me implies that I asked for permission, but yes, I was curious, so I did read your file. They’re baffled over the fact that you’re still coherent and capable of occlumency after ten years of dementor exposure. They don’t seem to realise that you hate them, but they are reluctant to give you a clean bill of health because it’s incredibly suspicious that you appear to be emotionally stable and of sound mind after a decade in Azkaban. Whatever façade of normalcy you’re using may have fooled Dorea and your little light friends, but normal people wouldn’t... look normal after an ordeal such as that.”

Sirius scoffed. “Ironically enough, I’m actually not using a persona. Yes, I have had a lot of practice pretending not to be a crazy person, but...I’m just happy to be out here in the real world again. I have a project to work on, I can talk to people, even if most of them are bloody mind-healers— I got through most of the guilt and anger during the negotiations — yes, it will probably come back the next time I fall down, but at the moment, it’s a non-issue, I don’t need to talk about it — and yes, dementors are awful, but for all the bad choices I wish I hadn’t had to make, all the things I wish I’d known, no matter how much I wish I could’ve been better, could have saved them somehow... I know — at least when I’m not down, I know — I didn’t make any wrong choices. Even– Even asking the Traitor to be Jamie’s secret-keeper. We had our reasons. It wasn’t like a coin-toss, what if we had just done the other thing -situation. 

“Bella had that much right, at least. If you always make the right choices, you don’t have anything to regret. And if you don’t regret your choices, what’s the worst the dementors can do? I’ve already lived through my worst memories and I survived. Their aura was a constant thing, a fog of misery, sapping the will to do anything, to escape, to live, but I had my anger at the Traitor and the knowledge that I was innocent, at least of betraying James and Lily, and of killing those people in Edinburgh, to keep me focused enough that I didn’t just lie down and die. And it’s not like a really bad, I’ll do anything to escape this life, running away and killing myself are equally valid options and I need to do one or the other right fucking now - down. ” 

He shrugged awkwardly. “Sorry. I know this is kind of heavy, not very Cool Uncle shite, but I’ve been... It doesn’t seem quite real. I mean, maybe you got lucky and you’ll take after Bella and won’t get the down side of the Madness—” 

Wait, what? Harry had thought he was mostly talking to Dru. Or maybe himself? He wasn’t really looking at either of them, more sort of at his knees, where he’d flopped down in an armchair...though he did look up at Harry as he went on.

“—don’t get me wrong, the bad ups can suck too, especially when you have to be around other people, but I’d take being slightly homicidal over seriously suicidal any day — but either way, it never really does seem quite real in hindsight, after you come down or claw your way back up to level ground. Makes it easier to put it behind me, I guess, than they think it should be, but it also makes it hard to remember that it’s Ninety-Two now, world went on without me for ten whole years, you know?”

“Er...not really?” Harry hazarded, feeling as unaccountably put on the spot as he had with Dru’s order to change the subject.

“ Heh. Well, on the one hand I kind of want to say you will one day, but I hope for your sake you don’t. Anyway, that was mostly rhetorical. Part of me wants to just get back out there, dive headfirst into catching up on everything I’ve missed, but a much more responsible part of me knows that living alone never works out well for me, and, well. Spending a decade in prison will show you who your real friends are, if nothing else, and they’re looking pretty thin on the ground at the moment, so not really having a place to go is a bigger problem at the moment than the mind-healers worrying I’m on the edge of another mental breakdown or that I’m some kind of freak because I’m not.”

Dru rolled her eyes. “Honestly, Sirius? If Andromeda doesn’t have a spare bed for you in that tiny house of hers — which I expect she does, as her elder child recently established her own household — I am absolutely certain that Mirabella will allow you to prevail upon her hospitality indefinitely. You’re here voluntarily and if you can’t think of anywhere else you might go simply because your school friends all died in the war or proved to be less than stalwart over the past decade, it is almost certainly because you haven’t entirely come to terms with events which occurred in the months and years immediately before you entered Azkaban. Which is, of course, understandable, but lingering here rather than pushing yourself to recognise and accept the personal and societal consequences of those events, will not help you to do so. 

“I can assure you that you’re not as stable as you think you are — you may have a clearer perspective of your own state of mind than the healers, but by virtue of the fact that you’re comparing yourself at the moment to your perception of your former state of mind, which I know you know is impossible to evaluate accurately in hindsight, rather than to a more objective standard, that perspective is biassed — but that you are currently capable of acknowledging that you are not in a state of mind to live independently indicates to me that you are well enough to move on to the next stage of your recovery, and if you continue to linger here getting bogged down in the details of your school — which you should really simply hire someone to deal with — with the excuse that you don’t know where to go, your recovery will lose its momentum and you will begin sinking again.

“I don’t doubt that the healers would say it’s bad practice to push you back into more stressful social arenas before you feel you’re ready to face them, but quite frankly, they don’t know you. They don’t understand the environment in which you were raised. You need to continue challenging yourself — in this case to reintegrate into the larger community and come to understand through experience the ways in which Britain has changed over the past ten years, and, perhaps more depressingly, the ways in which it very much has not — or you will lose your sense of direction and purpose.”

Sirius scowled. “Yeah, that’s pretty much the opposite of what the healers are saying. I tried telling them that a week of pampering and relaxing was more than enough, but I’m pretty sure they thought I was lying and trying to pretend I was fine because I don’t want to admit the dementors hurt me as badly as they did, or something?” 

Dru nodded. “Your file indicated a concern over denial of your own physical and emotional state.”

“Yeah, well, fuck them. I know exactly how badly the dementors fucked me up, thanks. I don’t want to spend any more time sitting around doing nothing, I just did that for ten fucking years.” At that point, he seemed to realise that he was getting sort of loud and cut himself off for a second, rubbing at his forehead. “Sorry. I didn’t— I would’ve left by now, but Naël said I should stay until I get my temper under control a little more and level off, not move on until they say I’m ready, because I can’t tell. Said the same thing about me being biassed that you did, actually.”

“Naël? I didn’t notice that name in the file...?”

Sirius shrugged. “That’d be because he’s not a healer. He’s a masseur. Very good with his hands, if you know what I mean.” He smirked, waggling his eyebrows in a way Dru definitely didn’t appreciate. 

She just sighed at him, all exasperated, though, without giving Harry a clue as to what he actually meant, which was slightly annoying because, “No? I mean, wouldn’t you expect a masseur to be good at massage?” Obviously he was missing something...

Sirius gave him a look like he wasn’t sure if Harry was having him on. Before he could ask, though, Dru said, “Regardless of how well this Naël knows you in the biblical sense—” Oh, it was a sex thing? “—I doubt he knows you personally well enough to offer an informed opinion on the matter.”

“I doubt you know me personally well enough to offer an informed opinion, Auntie. I don’t even know how long it’s been since I’ve seen you in person. Not that it matters, since I’ve literally never had a real conversation with you.”

Dru smiled so thinly, Harry wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t more of a grimace. “I don’t need to speak to you to have observed your developmental trajectory as a child. I might have deliberately tried to avoid noticing anything unless I absolutely had to whilst I was trapped in my marriage, but I was required to instruct you in several different subjects, as I’m sure you recall. It’s hardly as though I could avoid seeing how similar you were in temperament to Bellatrix, and your mother did keep in touch with me through the girls’ trials, recounting among other things the circumstances of your abandonment of the House. She said, and I quote, that you had never reminded her so much of Orion.”

Sirius’s expression, on the other hand, was definitely a grimace. “Because she knew me so well...”

“She and I both knew well enough what self-destructive melancholy looks like, and the desperate attempt to stop yourself sliding into it which was taking refuge with Dorea and devoting yourself to her son. Sinking into numbness and self-recrimination, then coming up with a reckless scheme to prove your worth to him is exactly what I would expect in response to rejection by your chosen lord—”

“Walburga didn’t tell you about that,” Sirius interrupted. “I was already staying with the Potters! Dumbledore didn’t even write to Arcturus!”

“No, that was in your healer’s file. Apparently someone wrote to Saint Mungo’s and asked John McKinnon for a copy of his notes from your sessions with him as a teenager.”

“That bastard,” Sirius scowled. “He swore he wouldn’t tell anyone what I told him...”

“I regret to inform you, Sirius, but healer’s vows generally allow the sharing of privileged information between healers for the purpose of treatment,” Dru said drily. 

He groaned. “ Whatever.”

“Quite honestly, I could have predicted as much, had I been informed of the circumstances. You obviously didn’t take Bella’s apparent rejection of you over the previous Yule well, and while lashing out at the House when they forced you to renew your vows in spite of their refusal to uphold their duty to you was understandable, I expect abandoning the House would have left you untethered, and that you hadn’t regained a sense of equilibrium before the incident which sparked the Potter boy’s rejection—”

“Stop saying that! Please,” he added somewhat belatedly. “It wasn’t a rejection, we made up...”

“Wholeheartedly adopting his positions, up to and including following him into Albus’s little Order, may have allowed you to reconcile with Potter, but if you think I have no idea how maddening it was to have him push you away and the lengths you would go to in order to regain his attention, I suggest that you ask Mirabella what happened to Candidus Malfoy and Zevi Prince and every other Knight with more seniority than Bellatrix.”

“Wait, what? What happened?”

Harry was betting Bella had killed them, just based on the context of the comment, though presumably Mira would have more details. He made a mental note to ask her, too.

“Which part of ‘ ask Mirabella' was unclear? I sincerely doubt that Potter knew what he meant to you, you know.”

“Yeah,” Sirius muttered, suddenly downcast. “I know. But he took me back. We made up.”

“And you adopted his purpose for your own — followed him into the Aurory and Dumbledore’s Order of the Phoenix, and became one of the most fervent supporters of the Light, managing to find a new equilibrium in opposing the Dark Revolution.”

Sirius nodded again. 

“Well, I know you didn’t ask for my advice, but you’re not going to find it again here, surrounded by healers and servants encouraging you to sit around trying unproductively to process your feelings about your life before the war, dwelling on the past rather than engaging with the present and allowing yourself to grow up.”

Sirius gave her an odd smile Harry wasn’t entirely certain how to interpret. “Someone once told me that advice you don’t ask for is probably the advice you most need to hear.”

“I stand by that rule. You may get good advice when you ask for it as well, of course, but only the people who truly care about you will give you advice when you’re too overconfident to ask for it.”

The wizard’s smile grew considerably more teasing. “Careful, Dru, it almost sounded like you just admitted you care about me there.”

Dru, though, didn’t take it as teasing. Everything about her face and voice screamed sincerity when she answered, “Of course I care, Sirius. I’ve always cared. I just...didn’t always have the energy to try to address the problems surrounding me and so spent much of your childhood trying not to see them. There are certain matters I wish I had been forced to acknowledge and address at the time, but I wasn’t and I didn’t, and what’s done is done. I can’t change the past, and dwelling on past failures when I could be focusing on addressing today’s challenges is hardly a productive use of my time,” she concluded, giving him an oddly intense look like maybe she wasn’t just talking about herself, here.

Sirius clearly thought so, too. He sighed. “Message received. I’ll send a letter to Meda tonight.” He paused for a moment, as though unsure whether he actually wanted to add, “Thanks, Dru.”

“Don’t mention it, Sirius.”