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It was midnight, and by all accounts, the inhabitants of the castle should be asleep by now.
But there was one wandering around, making her way quietly to the hall of heroes, her wand tucked into her sleeve, tip alight and hanging out just past her wrist to softly light her way. She brushed against something in the dark, freezing before realizing that it was just the corner of the wall.
Sighing in relief, she started forward once more, stopping to lower the light and get it out of her sleeve. She was in the hall of heroes, no one came here at night except for Professor Longbottom, and she had made sure to study his schedule.
His visit had ended about half an hour ago.
She smiled as she sat down, unaware of the portrait of Sirius Black, supposedly sleeping, right above her head. Instead of sleeping, the painted man was watching her, an eyebrow raised, as she leaned against the wall and pulled out a picture of a woman. It was obviously her mother, they had the same hair and, from what Sirius could see, the same sort of facial features.
The girl rubbed her eyes, crying softly. "Mum..." she whispered, sighing "I wish you could be here to see this...I'm getting O's in almost all of my classes, except for Transfiguration, but you know that was never my best subject."
Sirius watched a little more carefully, interest peaked just a bit more. The girl was wearing Hufflepuff house colors in stripes on her pajama pants.
Her wand was still in her hand.
"I just wish there was a spell to bring back the dead...Something like...I dunno, Vivo...Vixi...Victum..." she said quietly, not noticing that she was waving her wand at the same time, or that it was aimed up and backward.
The spell she had accidentally muttered hit the frame of Sirius's portrait, knocking him to his knees with the force of the shaking. His eyes wide, he gripped the chair that had been painted into the background of his portrait as it happened again.
Distantly, he heard the girl sigh. "It probably wouldn't work though, something would go wrong and I would hate myself for the result..." she shrugged. As she continued talking to her mom's picture, she never noticed the painted portrait of Sirius Black going dark, the man in the painting disappearing.
Sirius Black woke up.
Well, he thought he had. When he opened his eyes, the world around him was gray and empty, an expanse of nothingness that extended as far as his eyes could see in every direction. He blinked, and nothing changed.
The last thing he remembered was the battle in the ministry, Bellatrix’s stunning spell throwing him back through the curtain. His chest still ached, a little, as he thought about it. Like it had only been a couple of seconds. He knew that wasn’t true, however, because he also vaguely remembered something about Hogwarts and paintings and other such things.
With a sigh, he stood up and looked around again.
Still gray.
Still nothingness.
“Well,” he muttered, making a face at the way his voice echoed. “Might as well start walking.” He looked behind him once more, seeing the faint outline of a curtain. Somehow, without knowing the how and the why, he knew that he would not be able to go towards it no matter how long he walked.
So he began walking.
Time passed like he was in a dream; all at once too slow and too fast, an hour unfurled into a week and eternity into a minute. If he hadn’t been oriented along what seemed to be a ground, he would have lost track of up and down as well as the rest of the directions. It was a pleasant enough journey, he supposed. Quiet, calm, no danger bearing down on him.
It was lonely.
He wondered how Harry was doing. He’d gotten to speak to him, briefly. He thought he had, at any rate. Sirius frowned as he continued to walk. It was hard to remember and impossible to forget, all at once. There was something about the place keeping him almost-captive. Something that made remembering difficult, made memories slip through his hands like water in a leaking cup. Or sand through fingers.
Or was it the other way around?
With all of this going on, Sirius didn’t see the doorway until he smacked into it.
It rattled in its frame and he fell back onto his backside, frowning up at it. The door itself was a plain thing, remarkably smooth for what looked like an otherwise ordinary door. When he reached up and tapped on it, the noise that echoed back to him was not the noise expected from wood but from a metal of some kind.
Sirius blinked a couple of times, almost having a staring contest with the handle.
When he bothered to look around, he saw more doors. Some of them were small, barely higher than his knees. Some were twice his height. Except for the one in front of him, they all looked like the curtain he had seen before he had begun to walk. Grayed out instead of starkly detailed in silver and black.
When he stood back up, his stomach flipped. Sirius ignored it and reached for the handle of the door, turning it slowly. It opened without any hesitation.
For some reason, he had expected it to refuse, to not budge and simply stay there to torment him.
It opened into a hallway.
There was a coatrack and a shoe rack, as well as a potted plant on either side of a door off to his left. The walls were painted a warm shade of blue, making the room seem bigger than it was. The shoe rack had a pair of dirtied sneakers, a pair of wellie boots, and a couple of pairs of dress shoes of some kind. The coat rack had a black cloak, a green cloak, and a couple of muggle-style coats. He could see a couple of scarves tucked in between the coats.
Sirius frowned at them, tilting his head.
There was nothing to tell him where he was now. The door he had come through turned out to be, when he looked back at it, a mirror. A full-length one, presumably for checking final appearances before heading out the door. He could see himself in it – had half expected not to have a reflection anymore.
“Just a minute!” someone’s voice called from another part of the house. “Too much shopping to get settled in by yourself? You know you only need to make a noise and I’ll come to help – Merlin, if you throw a fit again…” the speaker laughed, their voice coming closer.
They sounded a little familiar, but it was in a way that Sirius could not place.
“Just had word from your father, by the way, he’ll be here in an – Well.” The speaker stopped just inside the room, a hand on the wall to steady themselves.
Sirius turned from inspecting himself to see an almost-ghost with green eyes instead of the ones he remembered from being a teenager. “…Harry?” he winced at his voice, the way it sounded rough and tore at his throat a little.
Harry nodded, his mouth hanging open as he continued to stare, blinking a couple of times. “Sirius.”
Taking a moment to look over the changes he could see in his godson’s face, Sirius nodded as well. Harry took a half-step back and leaned against the wall, covering his mouth with one hand as his eyebrows rose. “Uh,” he blinked some more, at an obvious loss for words.
Sirius could practically see the theories flying through his mind, working over and over on how Sirius Black was standing in front of him.
A knock on the door behind him made both of them jump. “Harry,” came a voice from beyond it. “Open the door.”
“Oh,” Harry jerked away from the wall and cross to the door, pausing to look at Sirius again. “Interesting thing,” he told the person on the other side. “Something happened.”
“Can it happen when I’m inside the house as well? It is bloody freezing out here.”
Harry opened the door and waited until the person was inside before quickly closing it behind him. “Your father’s going to be here in about an hour,” he told them. “Dinner is about halfway done. Molly helped me with the trickier parts, so we know those are going to be good.”
“Oh good,” the new arrival hadn’t noticed Sirius yet, still too busy setting down bags and working on removing the scarf, hat, and gloves. “You know I love you, but you also know I do not appreciate getting food poisoning.” The hat came off to reveal almost-white blond hair and the speaker paused. “You were saying something happened?”
Harry pointed and Sirius felt the urge to laugh bubbling up in his chest.
Turning, the new arrival froze, his scarf in his hands, paused in the act of taking it off of his neck. “Uh-huh,” Draco Malfoy’s eyebrows rose almost to his hairline. “Potter, I thought we were past the run of luck that said strange things had to happen to you.”
“Yeah,” Harry chuckled weakly. “I could have sworn we were.”
~
Sirius Black was in his living room.
Harry shoved a hand into his hair, pushing it back from his face as he watched his partner check the man over. No signs of Polyjuice, a little dehydrated and malnourished but in otherwise good health. The sort of deterioration expected from a couple of days in a coma, Draco had said. Not the sort of thing expected from being dead for over a decade.
“What do you remember?” Draco asked, his voice the very definition of professional. He was good at that, at pretending that something wasn’t bothering him. Ever since he had been made assistant to the Head Healer at St. Mungos, he had gotten so much better at it. Something about the amount of responsibility, about needing to make sure their faith in him was well-placed.
Harry was proud of him.
He was also glad that one of them was able to think clearly, at the moment. It was not going to be him, not with how confused and off-balance he still felt. Sirius had appeared in their house out of nowhere, looking just as lost as a part of Harry had felt since the end of the war.
“…Walking,” Sirius said after a moment of deep thought, staring off into nothing. “A lot of walking. Really, truly, a lot.” He made a face, his gaze dropping to his hands where they sat in his lap, and Harry laughed a little.
With a small smile twisting his lips, Draco nodded. “Alright. Do you remember what happened just before you…Disappeared?”
“The Ministry,” Sirius nodded. “The Hall of Prophecy. Harry and his friends were being attacked by the Death Eaters. I punched Luce – Lucius. Malfoy.” He hesitated, then added. “Your father.”
Draco sat back and nodded again. “Alright,” he curled both of his hands around his wand, settling it sideways in his lap as he studied Sirius’s face. “To be fair, he did deserve that at the time.” Harry noticed, after a second, that none of them were going to address the oddly-fond nickname that had slipped out of Sirius’s mouth. “Do you want to know some of what happened, since then?”
“Yeah,” Sirius licked his lips nervously and Draco didn’t even look away from him as he summoned a glass of water and carefully handed it to the man.
“Well,” Harry cut in, moving closer and dropping down to sit on the ground. “We won the war. Voldemort is gone. We lost some people,” he felt a wave of sadness rise up inside of him and he pushed it away to deal with later. “We lost some people.” He found himself repeating.
“…Moony?”
“Yeah,” Harry cleared his throat, finding it almost impossible to meet his godfather’s eyes. “Tonks, too. Actually,” he checked the clock. “Their son is named Teddy, he and the boys and,” he turned to Draco for a moment, making a face. “Your father. They’ll be here in just a few minutes.”
“Oh,” Draco looked at the clock as well and Harry could almost see the panic in his eyes for a moment. “Hell.”
“Might be, yeah,” Harry looked at Sirius again, noticing the way they were being watched. “Sirius?”
“Yeah, pup,” Sirius looked at the both of them. “When did this happen?”
“Ginny and I got divorced a couple of years ago,” Harry began. Draco reached out and took his hand, rubbing a thumb over the back of it. The quiet calm in the other man seemed almost to transfer through the skin-to-skin contact and Harry relaxed a little.
“Astoria and I were engaged for a long time, had a son, then never married,” Draco sighed. “I…It was because of you,” he told Sirius. “My father and I had a talk about what was expected of pureblood sons, of Malfoys and heirs and all of that. And then,” he smiled, silver eyes included. “He told me to, basically, throw tradition out and ignore all of it unless I actually wanted to follow it. Something about an arranged marriage and having lost out on someone he truly loved. He and my mother remain good friends to this day,” Draco took a deep breath. “But they got their own marriage picked apart when things finally settled down. Neither of them were happy, not truly.”
“What, his father allowed that?” Sirius snorted.
“Grandfather Abraxus has been dead since I was…” Draco frowned, screwing up his face as he tried to remember. “Four? Five? Sometime in between, I suppose. I hated visiting him.”
For a moment, Harry felt his breath catch at the hope in Sirius’s eyes. “Is he happy?” the man asked of his cousin’s son.
“My father?” Draco nodded. “He adores my son, Harry’s children, Teddy…He doesn’t want to admit to it, but he does occasionally spoil them, just a tad too much. Says that is what grandparents are for. My mother agrees with him.”
“So when you say the boys…”
“Albus, James, Scorpius, Teddy.” Draco filled in promptly. “Harry’s two, my one, Professor Lupin’s son.”
Harry felt a grin on his lips and nodded. “It’s really funny to watch. Lucius Malfoy with four grandsons to spoil and a granddaughter as well. Although, I still think he was lying about being ready to pass out from nerves when they just about coerced him into buying half of George’s shop.”
Draco snorted out a laugh before covering his mouth, taking a moment to rein himself back in. “Probably,” he nodded, turning when they heard a knock on the door. “That’ll be them now. Lily has a sleepover tonight, right?”
“Yeah,” Harry nodded. “And tomorrow, they all go over to their mum’s for the week. Did Astoria want Scorpius this weekend or is he staying here?”
“Oh, no,” Draco stood up and moved towards the door, a hand on the handle, and Harry could just about feel the chaos that was about to erupt. An entire lifetime of being close to the explosion had prepared him, after all. “Astoria went on a trip to America with her husband – Scorpius is either staying here without the others, which he hates, or he is going to the Burrow with them and Ginny.”
“Definitely the Burrow,” Harry grinned. “Molly always likes seeing all of her grandkids and she considers him one of them.”
“Fair enough,” Draco opened the door, moving reflexively to catch the teenager that fell inside when he did. “How many times have we told you to be careful when we’re opening the door, Albus?” he scolded gently. “One day, it won’t be us who opens it and you’ll fall and hit your head. Do you need me to explain concussions again?”
“No sir, mister Draco sir!” Albus stuck out his tongue as he gave Draco a small, almost-mocking salute. He scampered further into the house, dropping down next to the bench to wrench his boots off and toss them onto the rack. He grinned when his brother plopped down next to him and did the same, both of them poking at each other and teasing gently, James pulling off Albus’s hat and tossing it into the air.
“Boys?” Harry looked at Sirius and smiled at the look on his godfather’s face. “Could I ask the four of you to head up to your rooms for a bit before dinner? Draco and I have got some things we need to talk to your grandfather about.”
“Alright,” James nodded, shrugging out of his coat.
Albus nodded. “Yeah, dad.”
Scorpius seemed to materialize at Albus’s side, his own coat folded neatly over one arm and his boots in the other. “Yes,” he nodded as well. He screeched, a little, when his cousin came up behind him and slid some snow down the collar of his shirt.
“Teddy,” Harry pinned the metamorphmagus with a look.
“Sorry, Harry,” Teddy grinned. “The opportunity was too good. We’ll wait upstairs.”
“And if I see Extendable Ears dangling down,” Harry called after the four of them as they scurried off in a pack. “I will be taking them away.”
Harry looked over to the door and spotted the back of Lucius’s head. Draco had turned him so that his back was to Sirius, had used the chaos of the boys entering the room to disguise the manipulation of how they were standing. It almost made Harry want to laugh.
“Lucius,” he greeted, smiling at the man as he came to stand next to his partner. Lucius almost-smiled at him, a warmth in his eyes that had been easy to find once Harry had known what to look for. “So,” Harry started when Draco’s voice dropped off, leaving a gap for him to enter the conversation. “Strange things are happening.”
“Draco was saying something along those lines,” the corner of the older Malfoy’s mouth curled up. “Something about how he came home to chaos, today? Though from what he has told me of your experiments and the work you sometimes bring home, I would not think that was anything out of the ordinary.”
“This is…Technically me bringing work home,” Harry hedged after a minute. “It’s about the Veil of Uncertain Truths.”
The moment he said it, Lucius’s eyes turned from a soft gray to a sharp silver.
The Veil of Uncertain Truths was the name given to the curtain in the Department of Mysteries, the one that Sirius Black had fallen into and never fallen out of. In one side and never to be seen again on the other.
It had taken some convincing and some near-blackmail, but Lucius had eventually told them about his change of mind in the middle of that battle. He and Sirius Black had once dated – school sweethearts, almost – before they had broken it off and Lucius had immediately been engaged to Narcissa. Abraxus Malfoy’s wishes, force of stubborn will that the man had been. From what Draco had told Harry, his grandfather had been the sort of person that would definitely have supported eradicating half the wizarding population under the guise of keeping it, “Pure”.
His son had been in love with another boy and Abraxus had threatened to destroy whoever it was, even without knowing their name.
So Lucius had let him go.
“Harry,” Lucius seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. Harry had learned, by now, what that meant. It meant that Lucius either did not wish to offend or he was trying to keep calm. “What about the Veil?”
“Well,” Harry grinned, scratching at the back of his head. “Apparently, it does give up what it takes, sometimes.” He gestured behind Lucius and accepted it when Draco covered his face with one hand and let himself almost fall into Harry’s side, silently laughing. He could practically hear his partner saying something about his inability to phrase things in a non-blunt manner.
Lucius turned, giving Harry got a front-row view of the moment his entire body seemed to relax. “Sirius,” he whispered.
~
He was older now.
That was the first thing that Sirius noticed. He had known that a lot of time had passed – Harry’s own age was a sure sign of that, after all – but he hadn’t realized just how much time. Young wizards looked young until they didn’t, anymore.
Lucius, however, was just starting to look like what muggles called ‘middle-aged’. His hair was paler, his eyes starting to show soft wrinkles at the edges. He held himself like he was in at least a little bit of pain. There was some part of Sirius that felt a sort of choking sadness at that. Lucius had been graceful, the last time they had seen each other for more than a few minutes. Even the brief glimpse in the Department of Mysteries had shown that he still possessed that grace.
“Lucius,” Sirius finally made himself speak up.
“Sirius,” Lucius said again, looking like someone had stunned him, for a moment, before he turned to his son and Harry. “Would the two of you mind letting us have a few minutes?”
“Sure,” Harry cut over Draco’s confusion, guiding the other wizard out of the room.
It was a move that left Sirius and Lucius alone together, for the first time since they had been dating during their Hogwarts years. Neither of them spoke for a while, Lucius only moving closer with a look that Sirius couldn’t identify on his face. Once upon a time, he had been able to read just about every emotion on the git’s face, could have written a book or two on what every single tick and twitch meant. That had also been before Abraxus’s death, before Lucius had broken things off without so much as a ‘Goodbye’ and been promptly engaged to Sirius’s cousin.
“You have no idea how happy I am to see you alive,” Lucius whispered.
Sirius snorted out a laugh. “Really, Lucius? You’re happy about me being here?” he felt something sour climb into his throat, decades worth of anger and loss and sadness and loneliness tearing at him from the inside out. “You?”
“Yes,” Lucius nodded, pulling off his cloak and settling it on the rack next to the door before he crossed the room completely and stood in front of Sirius.
The fight left him, then.
Every inclination he’d had to yell at the wizard in front of him, every urge to hit him and scream at him and cry and wish they’d been something that had lasted – all of it left him. Sirius stared at up Lucius and took a deep breath. “Well…Good.”
Lucius was the one laughing, this time, and Sirius nearly groaned at the bubble of fondness that welled up inside of him. “I had rather missed your sense of humor,” he told Sirius after a second of shaking shoulders and a smile he couldn’t seem to help. “How did you ever return?” he studied Sirius for a minute, gesturing to encompass all of him. “You fell through the curtain and never came out of the other side of it.”
“I walked,” Sirius shrugged one shoulder, trying to remember. The longer he sat in Harry’s front room, the less he remembered about what had happened once he had passed through the veil. “For a long time. There were doors I knew I couldn’t go through and then there was a door I could go through. When I got to it, I went through it and then I was here.” He frowned, nodding slowly. “Harry was here, too, and I think that might be why I could be here, now.”
With a slow nod, Lucius leaned forward to press his fingers to Sirius’s pulse, much like Draco had already done. “You seem alive and well,” he murmured. “And there is a bruise on your hand that I remember seeing there when we were in the Ministry.”
Sirius blinked a couple of times, raising his hand to look at it.
It was, in fact, a bruise he had gotten while sorting through the things in the attic of his mother’s house. He had smacked his hand into something, though he could not quite remember what it was. It had been sore throughout his time at the Ministry, something he had been aware of but not focused on while the fight had been happening.
He could remember, faintly, being at Hogwarts not that long ago.
None of his memories were making any sort of sense and it made him want to sleep for a week when he tried to pull at them. Sirius looked up at Lucius and, very slowly and deliberately, tilted his head so that his cheek rested on the man’s wrist. “Can we sort through memories later?” he asked, his voice quiet.
“…Of course,” Lucius blinked a couple of times, his cheeks flushed as he looked at the point of contact between them.
He probably remembered the few times that Sirius had gotten letters from home while at school, the days where Sirius had needed nothing more than quiet and the heat of a body wrapped around him. Before they had gotten together, James and Remus had curled up in his bed with him, cracking stupid jokes and talking about nothing. After they had gotten together, Lucius had pushed Sirius into his bed and practically sat on him, brushing fingers through his hair.
There were very few times when Sirius was so overwhelmed by something that he needed help, but the times had been memorable when they’d happened.
They were older now, with Lucius having had a son and a now-ex-wife, but they were still there. Perhaps their future would hold something between the two of them once more. In the other room, Sirius could hear Harry and Draco speaking with their kids.
He had finally made it home.