Chapter Text
"Blowing up Aunt March definitely wasn't a good idea!" he thought after he ran away from the Dursleys and into the dark night. He was almost certainly going to be expelled for this. Now he would have to go to Diagon Alley to get some gold out of his vault before he could try and live as a man on the run for the rest of his life. How hard could it be?
But how would he get there? Maybe he could ride his Nimbus 2000. No, he didn't know which way he had to go.
What would he do if the Aurors caught him? They would snap his want and put him in Askaban. He couldn't let them catch him, but he wasn't able to fight them either. He wasn't even a third year yet; what could he do against them?
He could go to the Weasleys; they might help him. Charley once helped them smuggle a dragon out of Hogwarts, after all. They might let him stay with them until he could get to Gringotts. There was one problem with that plan, though. He couldn't get to them, and he couldn't even tell them what was going on. He didn't know where Hedwig was because he had told her to leave for a week. Aunt March was going to be at Privet Drive, and he didn't want his owl to meet her dog.
Harry sat down on the sidewalk, contemplating his choices further, when he saw a black dog on the other side of the road. It was, without a doubt, the biggest dog he had ever seen. On first glance, it looked more like a bear than a hound. It was rather dirty, like a wild canine.
"Hey their! Do you maybe have a home I could go to?" He said he felt oddly familiar with the dog but had no idea where he could have seen it before. "I'm Harry Potter, by the way. I would ask you for your name, but you're a dog."
Then the dog suddenly started to run up to him and jump on him. Harry felt a little weird now; lying there on the sidewalk in the middle of the night, a strange dog sprawled over him. But the dog wouldn't budge.
Without warning, it started to change—snout shortening, tail disappearing, limbs stretching. It had become a human.
"Wha, who are you? Why are you here? Are you an Auror? I didn't do anything. I was just taking a walk here, and" he couldn't come up with a better lie. He would just have to pretend like he hadn't known what they were here for.
"Ha, I'm no Auror Cup, but that doesn't matter now. Does it?" The strange man said he looked kind of sickly if Harry looked at him closely. "Who are you, then? And why are you calling me Cup?" Harry asked, thinking about where this man could possibly have come from.
The man seemed to deflate a little but didn't linger on the question for long. "Well, I'm Sirius, Sirius Black." He said that, looking like a puppy waiting to be kicked. "Hello Sirius- Would you tell me why you're here, though? Your name isn't familiar to me at all, and I have no idea what's going on." The young boy promted, not sure if this was one huge trick to get him to admit to inflating March.
"You don't know who I am?" Sirius asked, dumbfounded. "Yeah, should I?" "Yes..."
"Well, since apparently nobody told you, I'll have to. I'm your godfather, Harry," he says happily. Harry needed a couple seconds to process that. "Godfather, but how come I never met you?" he interrogated accusingly.
"You see, I have been... occupied somewhere else, so I've not been able to take care of you, Harry. I wasn't allowed to leave or write to you." He told him regretfully. "What were you so obsessed with that you couldn't inform me of the fact that you existed?" He remarked viciously.
"I was in Askaban." Sirius replied guiltily.
"Wait, what? Why would you be in there?" Was he going insane? Maybe the man was just joking. "I was framed for a crime I didn't commit. I was accused of the murder of thirteen Muggles and Peter Pettigrew. Now that I have escaped from that hellhole, I wanted to make sure that you were okay.
"So, you're on the run from the Aurors too, aren't you?" He announced "Do you maybe have a place for us to stay?" "What, why would you be arrested?" Sirius commented, quite shocked. "I blew up my aunt's sister-in-law and have gotten a warning for underage magic already." Harry replied in a flat voice. "Well, we could stay at Grimmauld Place; I used to live there before I ran away from my family at sixteen. But the place is incredibly nasty, and I don't think you'd like to be there. Plus, I think you wouldn't get more than a stern warning anyway."
"Oh, ah, I was actually hoping that I might... I want to stay with you; I don't really want to stay with my relatives." Sirius smiled after Harry had requested to stay with him. "If you would like to, then I can't say no, can I?" He grinned. Harry beamed at him.
"Sirius, where is it? You said that we were going to Grimmauld Place number 12, but I can't see anything between 11 and 13," he bewilderedly stated. "One of the best features of this house is the security system. The Lord Black, aka. me, has absolute control over it's defenses, including who can see it." He snipped his fingers twice, and a beautiful building appeared in between the other two.
"Wow, that's cool," he said, feeling happy that his godfather hadn't been lying to him. "Yeah, and one day you'll be able to do this to Cup," Sirius called, walking closer to the doorstep. Just as he opened the door, an incredibly loud voice started to scream: "Blood Traitors in the ancient home of the Black Family, how dare you and these filthy little Halfbreads enter..." The portrait of the screaming lady was hidden behind cuirtains, and they moved further into the house.
Harry couldn't hold back; he just had to ask, "Who was that?" Sirius replied as quickly as possible. "My Mother." He didn't know how to respond to this. He settled on: "I know why you would run away now." "Now, what do we do?" He asked as Sirius didn't reply.
What followed was two hours of cleaning the house. It was incredibly dusty, as if the residence hadn't been cleaned in a decade. The building was also gigantic; Harry was pretty sure it was around half as big as Hogwarts (not counting the grounds). The thing was at least nine stories tall. He had found a nice bedroom for himself on the third floor, which was less dirty than the rest of the home. His godfather said that he would sleep in his old room, stating that he was used to it being dirty.
Sirius tried to make the house-elf Kreacher—the only one that had survived the last decade without abandoning the dwelling—and had quickly gotten insulted for his trouble. "Heya, Harry," Sirius said, looking stoicly at a vace with black ravens on it. "I haven't told you everything yet." "You see, I am... I was framed by Peter Pettigrew. He made sure that everyone in the wizarding world thought I had killed him, but he also made sure that people thought I had, that... I had been the one to rat out your parents to Voldemort.", he cried in a mixture of anger and sadness.
"What do you mean, rat out?" He was slightly confused by that. What was he talking about? "Has no one told you?" He said this, exasperated and shocked by the question. "Why would I ask if I knew?" Harry stated, plainly trying to be funny.
"Harry, I'm going to tell you a very long story. Please don't interrupt me before I'm done talking." Sirius voice sounded somber and regretful, but weirdest of all, angry. "Alright," he answered, feeling a bit weird.
Harry felt appalled. Wormtail had betrayed his parents after he had been their friend for years. He had essentially handed them to Voldemort on a silver platter. His godfather was imprisoned in Askaban for a decade because of him. He wanted to strangle that little rat immediately.
During all the drama of finding out that someone had basically set up his parents to die, Harry didn't notice that he had started crying. "Oh, Harry, I didn't know it would end this way. I'm so sorry that nobody told you sooner. I should have broken out way earlier." Harry hugged him. "Why didn't you escape before now? I don't get why you wouldn't want to, and I don't think you weren't able to."
"Cup, there aren't a lot of people that would believe me," he told Harry sadly. "I'm sure that isn't the case. I mean, you're nice and kind; I wouldn't say a murderer acts like you do." Sirius smiled. "I'm happy to hear that from you, Cup, but not even Remus believed me; otherwise, he would have demanded I get a trial."
"Can we maybe do something happier now? I feel like I'm going to start crying again if we don't." "Sure, Harry," Sirius called, picking up the now-shaddered vaces-sharts. Harry irritatedly started cleaning again.
He felt like he was forgetting something, but he didn't know what it could be. He now knew how his godfather had ended up in the ministry after all. Then it hit him. "Sirius, what are we going to do about my underage magic? Aren't I still being searched for even if I didn't commit a crime?"
"We'll worry about that later."