The Echo Between Us.

by wispandwyrm (Wispandwyrmfiction)

Summary:

The war ended. Harry survived. Draco Malfoy didn’t.

That’s what the Prophet says, anyway.

Ten years later, Harry is a decorated Auror with a talent for throwing himself at danger and a refusal to talk about the one name that still lands like a curse. Sirius sees the cracks, remembers every time he chose silence, and starts to realise there’s more buried in those missing summers than anyone wanted to admit.

Post-war Drarry. Slow burn, hurt/comfort, and the ghosts you carry even when the world insists they’re gone.

Notes:

This work is a transformative, non-commercial fanfiction based on characters and settings created by J.K. Rowling. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made from this work.

Please se End Notes for additional warnings.

Tentative updates: Mondays and Fridays.

Chapter 1: The Shape of the Waiting Years.

Chapter 1.

The Shape of the Waiting Years. 

 

Sirius Black always loved the castle most in the early mornings, when the corridors were empty and the stones still held the quiet. Returning to Hogwarts as Defence Against the Dark Arts professor had given him a peace he hadn’t expected: the sort one earned by surviving rather than by luck. Yet lately, even the sunrise glimmering across the Great Lake wasn’t quite enough to settle the restlessness in his chest.

It had been ten years since the Battle of Hogwarts. 

The anniversary itself had been a slow-moving storm of memorials, speeches, the kind of collective reflection that hung over the school like humidity before thunder. Students whispered about it: who’d fought on which side, which family had been touched by loss, and who bore the shadows of responsibility. The staff braced themselves. Even the ghosts drifted a little more quietly, as though remembering.

And Remus… well, Remus had come home. That’s how Sirius thought of it, even if Remus insisted it was simply a job. Returning to Hogwarts as the Transfiguration professor had settled him, smoothing out the war-etched wariness in his face. McGonagall trusted him implicitly; students adored him. Sometimes Sirius wondered if Remus realised he’d become the kind of teacher they’d all needed when they were young and too proud to admit it. Watching him now, ink on his cuffs, hair silvering at the temples, Sirius felt that old, familiar ache of pride, threaded through with the quiet relief of knowing at least one of them had found a life that didn’t hurt to hold.

Sirius rested his hands on the window ledge, the stone cold beneath his palms, and exhaled. The grounds lay soft under the morning haze and for a moment his thoughts drifted, uninvited, to someone else who’d returned to these halls.

Severus Snape.

Of all the post-war surprises, Snape’s survival, and exoneration, remained among the hardest for Sirius to swallow. The trial had been brutal, chaotic; the Wizengamot snarled, the public hissed. And then Snape had opened the Pensieve memories.

Those memories still haunted Sirius: Dumbledore’s calm voice instructing Snape to kill him; the cursed ring devouring the Headmaster’s life; the truth unwinding in silver strands: years of double agency, quiet sacrifice, and the terrible knowledge of how little time Dumbledore had left. And worst of all, the devastation on Snape’s face when the order was given.

It hadn’t erased old grudges, Merlin knew nothing short of a Memory Charm could do that, but it had shifted something fundamental. Sirius remembered sitting in that courtroom, jaw clenched, watching a man he’d once despised stand stripped bare in a way that demanded a respect he’d been entirely unprepared to offer. And in the midst of it all, Harry confirms Snape’s story and  how, without his guidance, he’d never have had the knowledge or strength to defeat Voldemort.

And now Snape was back at Hogwarts, slipping into his old role as Potions Master as though those intervening years had been a rather dark fever dream. He’d resumed his post as Head of Slytherin House, a house now smaller and quieter, but still wary under his watch. Students still feared him. Staff still tolerated him with long practice. And Sirius…

Well.

Their relationship remained tense and brittle, full of familiar barbs neither seemed able to abandon. Yet here and there, unexpectedly, a flicker of something else appeared.

A grudging nod in a corridor.
A muttered complaint about a misbehaving class.
A shared mug of tea after a particularly soul-sapping staff meeting.
A rare glint of almost-humour in Snape’s eyes when Sirius murmured something sarcastic.

Not friendship. Merlin, no.  But… something. Something Sirius was surprised to find himself almost grateful for.

Maybe war changed everyone. Maybe returning from death’s edge, both of them, in their own ways left less room for the petty cruelties they’d once lived on.

The Malfoys drifted into Sirius’s thoughts like a cold draft under a closed door. Lucius Malfoy had been taken alive after the battle, dragged from the rubble still wearing the stunned expression he’d had the night he’d lied to Voldemort’s face and declared Harry Potter dead. A moment of courage, or desperation, or spite, no one could quite agree, but it was the reason Harry had lived long enough for the war to end.

Not that it saved Malfoy from judgment. He’d served ten years in Azkaban and now ten more under house arrest in the hollowed grandeur of what remained of Malfoy Manor with wards like prison bars, and wand confiscated.

Lucius Malfoy never spoke about the war. Not to interviewers or Ministry officials, and certainly not to the curious who wanted meaning from his silence. Sirius wasn’t sure whether Lucius Malfoy was hiding something… or simply refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of knowing what had broken him.

Narcissa’s end remained another wound the wizarding world preferred to pretend had stopped bleeding. It had happened in June of ’98, barely weeks after victory, while people were still learning how to breathe again. An Auror raid in London gone wrong. Resistance, a flash of spellfire, a body on the pavement. Some called it tragic. Others called it justice. Sirius wondered, now, whether she’d had a moment to regret anything in those final seconds or if she’d made her peace long before the Aurors arrived.

At the time, her death hadn’t troubled him much, though in the way any post-war casualty troubled someone who’d lived through two conflicts: with weary resignation rather than shock. The reports had been efficient, almost clinical: a former Death Eater found near King’s Cross, resisting arrest, and wand visible, shouting Harry’s name. The Aurors insisted they’d acted to protect civilians and Harry Potter.

Harry had been devastated. Not loudly, not as he was when losing someone dearly loved, but with a stunned, inward quiet that made Sirius think he was simply exhausted. 

Harry had gone to the Ministry within hours. He wasn’t an Auror yet; he had no authority. But he walked into the department with a kind of grim determination that made seasoned officers step back. Sirius followed only because Remus touched his arm and murmured, “Stay with him.”

Harry confronted the arresting Aurors in a low, controlled voice that admitted no evasion. Why lethal force? What exactly had Narcissa done to warrant killing her on a public street? They recited the procedure with growing confidence:  wand drawn, hostile shouting, “aggressive movement.”

Sirius remembered Harry’s expression then, not anger, but something colder. Something carved out of disbelief.

“And none of you considered,” Harry said quietly, “that she might have been calling for help?”

The room had gone still. It was more unsettling than any shouting would have been. It unsettled Sirius too, though he didn’t yet understand why.

When Harry’s magic began to ripple, subtle, but dangerous, enough to make the lamps flicker, Kingsley stepped in. He placed a firm hand on Harry’s arm with the calm authority only he possessed.

“Harry,” he said softly, “breathe.”

Harry had tried. Even then Sirius could see the effort. The restraint. But something in him was already buckling under a weight none of them had recognised.

Years later, Ron confided in Sirius over tea at the Burrow, speaking in the hushed tone of someone who’d been carrying a worry too long. He told Sirius that Harry kept an entire filing cabinet devoted to Narcissa’s case, witness statements, maps, weather reports, anything he could get. He stayed late at the Ministry poring over details everyone else had long stopped caring about.

Sirius had assumed it was lingering war-instinct: Harry trying to fix what couldn’t be fixed.

Sirius hadn’t known what to say. He only felt a growing unease, the sense that something inside Harry was winding tighter and tighter, long after the rest of the world had tried to move on.

And then there was Draco Malfoy.
Or rather, the absence of him.

He had vanished shortly after Dumbledore’s death: no body, no trace, not even a rumour sturdy enough to lean on. Some insisted he’d fled to the continent under a false name, carving out anonymity from the ruins of his family’s infamy. Others spat when his name surfaced, furious he hadn’t stayed to face the reckoning they believed he deserved.

But now and then, in the corner of a pub or a shadowed train platform, someone claimed to have seen a pale young man who looked like a ghost from a war everyone was trying to forget. Nothing was ever confirmed. Eventually the Ministry stopped pretending they were still searching.

Sirius didn’t know which version he believed. Perhaps Draco had escaped. Perhaps he’d fallen somewhere no one would ever find him. Or perhaps he was doing what so many others were: trying to live with the weight of choices made too young, too terrified, too alone. War carved scars into victors and vanquished alike, but Draco Malfoy’s story was one the public rarely spoke, as though saying his name aloud might summon old shadows from the ashes.

Yet somehow Harry felt that absence keenly. It showed in the way he moved, hollowed out and restless, listening for something that never came. Sirius saw the tension in his shoulders, the way his eyes drifted to empty doorways as though expecting someone to step through them. He recognised the shape of grief even when Harry refused to give it a name. And Merlin, the guilt of it sat heavy on Sirius’s chest. He had been so harsh about the Malfoy boy, so quick to see only the name and not the fear behind it. He had dismissed Draco as a threat, an inconvenience, a weight Harry should not have to carry, and in doing so he had dismissed whatever Harry had been carrying for him. Maybe that was why Harry never quite opened up. Why he held his pain at arm’s length. Why the distance between them widened in small, imperceptible increments.

Sirius sometimes found himself circling back to the strange, bloodless way Lucius had killed his son, seven years after the war, with nothing but a clipped notice in the back of the Prophet, no body, no funeral, no reckoning, just a public declaration that Draco Malfoy was “deceased.” It had come not long after the legal unravelling of Narcissa’s estate, when questions of inheritance and succession began to surface and Draco’s name could no longer be conveniently deferred. A father erasing a child with ink. The wizarding world had accepted it with a shrug and a turned page. Grimmauld had not. The lamps had flared the moment Sirius told Harry, magic surging hot and angry through the walls as if the house itself knew the lie for what it was. Harry had not said a word. He had gone rigid, nodded once, and walked out. A forgotten cup of tea had gone cold on the table between them, skin forming on the surface by the time Sirius realised it was untouched. Harry had not spoken to him for three days after that.

In the quiet that followed, Sirius began to understand the uglier truth. Lucius had declared Draco dead to rid himself of a son who no longer fit his power or his ledger and Sirius, in his own fear and bitterness, had nearly done something smaller but just as careless. He had tried to make the Malfoy boy disappear from Harry’s life because it was easier than facing what Harry felt. Sirius had never asked what Harry did in that silence. He had not needed to. He saw the answer every day in the guarded way Harry learned to grieve alone. Harry was the place Sirius felt the change most sharply, but he was not the only proof that nothing had gone back to what it was.

With time, he began to notice that truth everywhere. Sirius sometimes caught himself marvelling at how the world had rearranged itself in the years since the castle burned. Ron, for one, had grown into himself in a way Sirius doubted the boy even realised. The awkward, red-eared teenager who once blurted out whatever crossed his mind had become a man with a steady stride and a clear sense of what mattered. He had given the Auror Office a few solid years, enough to prove he could do the job, enough to help rebuild what the war had cracked, and then stepped away without apology, choosing family and the joke shop with George over the Ministry’s endless grind. Sirius respected that. It took a particular kind of courage to walk toward the life you wanted instead of the one everyone expected.

Hermione, meanwhile, had marched into the Ministry as though she’d been preparing for it since first year. She carved out a place for herself with that same sharp mind and quiet ferocity she’d shown as a schoolgirl, but now it was tempered by something gentler, patience, perhaps, or the steadiness of someone who no longer needed permission to be brilliant. 

Sirius had watched her speak before entire committees without a tremor, dismantling outdated laws with the precision of a seasoned duelist, except the casualties were bad policies instead of Death Eaters. If anyone was shaping the world they’d fought for, it was her.

Sirius drew in a slow breath and let the familiar hum of the castle settle around him. Funny how it all came back, the shifting shadows, the distant murmur of students, the sense that Hogwarts was always listening, always remembering. He wondered if any of them truly understood how far they had come, or how strange and miraculous it was that they were all still here to see it.

Survival had rearranged them in quiet ways. Time had taken what it would and left them to grow around the empty spaces. Sirius saw the evidence of that everywhere now, in the lives that had bent without breaking, in the choices that looked small from the outside and meant everything to the ones making them.

And yet, for all of that, his thoughts kept circling back to Harry.

Of all of them, Harry was the one Sirius thought about most. Not because he was the Boy Who Lived, Sirius had stopped seeing that title years ago, but because Harry seemed determined to outrun something no victory had ever managed to banish. His godson had grown into a man the wizarding world watched with equal parts pride and hunger, the youngest Senior Auror in decades, decisive in the field, brilliant under pressure.

He threw himself into his work with a kind of relentless hunger Sirius hadn’t known he possessed. He led the most dangerous missions against the remnants of Voldemort’s supporters. He volunteered for surveillance shifts in the dead of night, in places no sensible wizard wanted to be. He spent a year as a junior Auror stationed at Azkaban and returned a hollowed, haunted version of himself.

But he didn’t stop.

While Ron found steadiness and Hermione carved purpose, Harry hurled himself into Auror work with the same reckless certainty he once brought to Quidditch dives. It wasn’t exactly bravery. It felt more like he expected the world to demand something terrible from him again and he was determined to be ready before anyone else even sensed the danger.

Sirius remembered one particular conversation with painful clarity. A winter evening, the fire snapping low in Grimmauld Place, the two of them alone while everyone else slept. Harry looked older than his years, Merlin he always did,   tightening the straps on his boots as though preparing for battle rather than a routine patrol.

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself” Sirius said quietly from the doorway.

Harry didn’t answer for a long time. Then, without looking up, he muttered, “If something’s going to happen, I’d rather be the one who gets there first.”

Sirius’s chest went cold. “That’s not your job anymore.”

Harry gave a small, humourless smile. “It’s always going to be my job.”

It was the closest Harry had ever come to admitting he didn’t know how to live any life that wasn’t spent bracing for catastrophe.

Hermione felt the unease in her own way. Her letters came regularly, neat, brisk handwriting, worry tucked politely between the lines. She did not accuse and never panicked; Hermione did nothing so imprecise. But she asked after Harry with a steadiness that never quite wavered.

Was he sleeping?
Had Sirius noticed how thin he looked the last time they met?
Was he still taking time off between cases, or had work swallowed him again?

Small, sensible questions. The sort that sounded like ordinary concern until they gathered weight by repetition. Hermione signed off each time with her usual composed flourish, but the meaning underneath was always the same. We lost too much to be careless with him now. I just want him to have a chance at peace.

Sirius answered as honestly as he could, though he hated how often his words fell short of reassurance. They had both watched Harry unravel once, brittle and determined to shoulder the world alone. Neither of them wanted to see him drift anywhere near that edge again.

“I like my job,” Harry would say whenever Sirius suggested he take time off. “It keeps me busy.”

But something in him was unsettled and unmoored, always reaching for something, or someone, who was no longer there. Sirius saw it in the pauses Harry left in his own life, in the way certain names still landed too heavily, in the things he never quite said.

And then there were those summers.

The ones Harry only ever described in half-sentences and uncomfortable smiles, in vague reassurances that sounded harmless unless you knew him as well as Sirius did. Sirius had told himself not to pry, for Harry’s sake as much as his own. He remembered sixth year all too well, the strange, shuttered looks Harry wore whenever Malfoy’s name came up, as though an unspoken threat had always hung between them. 

Now Sirius was no longer sure that staying silent had been the right choice.

These people, these lives were the proof that everything they’d fought for hadn’t been for nothing. The world wasn’t perfect, Merlin knew, but it was mending. Harry smiled when he visited Ron and Hermione at their cottage; he smiled when he came up to Hogwarts and collapsed in Sirius’s office chair with a cup of tea. But the smile never quite reached his eyes anymore.

Sometimes, if Harry was especially tired, the kettle on Sirius’s desk would whistle twice without anyone touching it, or the quills would give a faint shiver. Nothing dramatic. Nothing he ever seemed aware of. Just enough for Sirius to wonder.

It was how Harry used to look right before running headfirst into danger, like he was chasing something he couldn’t name.

Sirius knew that look too well.

He watched the sun crest the horizon, flooding the castle in fresh gold.

And somewhere far beyond Hogwarts’s wards, Sirius couldn’t shake the feeling that another thread of that old war, pale, unfinished, and still missing, was tugging quietly at the edges of Harry’s life.

 

Chapter 2: Things Left Unsaid.

Summary:

Sirius worries for Harry, Remus offers perspective, and Grimmauld waits for what comes next.

Notes:

See chapter 1 for disclaimer.

Chapter 2. 

Things Left Unsaid.

 

June 2008

Sirius stood at the window of Grimmauld Place, staring down at the streetlamps glimmering in the dusk.  Behind him, the old clock above the hearth ticked softly, its hands subtly enchanted to track the hour in more than one world. He’d found comfort in its steady rhythm these last few years.

Harry wasn’t home yet.

He had attended another former classmate’s wedding that afternoon. It seemed as though every few months now, another Gryffindor or Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw was binding their future with ribbons and enchanted vows, their invitations fluttering in on hopeful wings.

Sirius did not resent it. He simply noticed what it made visible.

Harry always went alone.

 

Later that evening, Sirius stood behind the worn armchair Harry favored, the one he folded himself into when he wanted to retreat without admitting it, and let his thoughts settle into the pattern they had been tracing for months. Harry never seemed to date. Not truly. People flirted. Harry answered with easy warmth and careful distance. His letters overflowed with training schedules, case notes, new spells, endless responsibility, but never with the quieter details of wanting someone. Never with a name.

Sirius did not want him rushing into anything. Merlin knew Harry had been shouldering too much for too long. He deserved the chance to discover himself somewhere outside of survival. Still, as the weddings accumulated and the milestones passed, Sirius could not ignore the subdued, unsettled quiet Harry carried home afterward. It was less loneliness than a sense that he had arrived at the edge of something everyone else seemed to understand.

Sirius moved slowly along the bookshelves: dense ranks of Auror manuals, battered Quidditch magazines, and a scatter of Muggle novels Hermione had sworn he would enjoy. One shelf held nothing but books on owls, an arrangement that made Sirius smile faintly despite himself. He paused at a photograph of Harry and Ron at one of Ginny’s early matches, Ron mid-laugh, elbow hooked into Harry’s ribs, Harry grinning wide and unguarded. Even there, in hindsight, Sirius could see the restraint at the edges of that joy. A carefulness most people shed long before Harry had been allowed to.

He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. He did not want to pry. He did not want to turn affection into another expectation Harry felt bound to meet. But it troubled him that a boy with so much capacity for love seemed to have nowhere to place the kind that asked to be chosen rather than needed.

Sirius leaned against the window frame and watched the dark settle over the grounds. He wondered, sometimes, whether Harry felt different, or was merely too busy keeping the world upright to notice the quieter claims of his own heart. He wondered whether Harry even believed he was permitted to want something gentle.

He would not rush him. He would not interfere. But he would be waiting for the day Harry finally let himself look in that direction, when life slowed just enough for want to speak.

And Merlin help whoever it turned out to be, Sirius thought with a faint, wry smile, because they would face the full, unapologetic scrutiny of a godfather who loved too fiercely to pretend otherwise.

Because Harry deserved someone who saw him not as the Chosen One or the survivor or the symbol, but as the young man who came home from weddings alone and, Sirius suspected, quietly wondered what happiness looked like when it was meant only for him.

The front door opened softly.

Harry stepped inside, loosening his tie. His eyes were tired, but they brightened when he saw Sirius.

“Hey,” Harry said. “You are still up?”

“Of course,” Sirius replied lightly. “Want tea?”

Harry nodded. His shoulders eased in that familiar way that always told Sirius he felt safe here.

Sirius watched him for a moment. Just a boy becoming a man. Still discovering what he needed. Still learning that he was allowed to need it at all.

Yes, Sirius thought. He would wait. He would watch over him. And one day, Harry’s heart would wake in its own time and in its own direction.

When it did, Sirius would be there. Ready to protect the boy he loved like a son from everything that might hurt him, and to celebrate everything that might finally make him whole.

 

A few nights later, the interruption came in the middle of supper. They had been eating in the sort of companionable quiet that had become common between them, Sirius paging through a book beside his plate while Harry worked through a report with his fork balanced in his free hand. The lamps were low and the air warm, and Grimmauld felt settled in a way Sirius never took for granted.

A Patronus swept through the room in a wash of cold blue light. Its glow edged across the table and over Harry’s face, and Sirius saw the moment Harry’s attention sharpened. It was an old reflex, shaped by years that should not have demanded so much of him.

The message was brief. Harry listened, jaw stilling a little as the voice faded into the air.

“There has been a sighting over by the old viaduct,” Harry said. “I need to check it out.”

Sirius watched him rise from his chair. Something moved across Harry’s face in the quiet that followed. It was faint and strange, neither dread nor relief. It reminded Sirius of the look someone might have when they stepped toward a familiar threshold they never quite wanted to cross, yet always expected to.

“Everything all right?” Sirius asked, keeping his tone even.

Harry hesitated as he reached for his coat. The pause was small but clear. Then he nodded. “Yeah. I will be.” The reply came too quickly, as if he hoped speed might keep the words from sounding unsure. He did not quite meet Sirius’s eyes.

He pulled on the robes with practiced movements and crossed the room. When he opened the door, the cooler air from the hallway slipped in around him, carrying the smell of damp stone and night. The latch clicked softly as he pulled it closed.

The house felt larger once he was gone, the kind of quiet that marked space recently emptied. Sirius stayed at the table for a moment, his hand resting lightly on the back of Harry’s chair, and let the stillness settle where the light had faded.

By morning, Harry looked nearly himself again or at least the version of himself he showed the world when he didn’t want questions. Sirius found him in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, already halfway through a cup of tea gone cold, reading a stack of reports with a focus far too sharp for such an early hour.

“You look better,” Sirius said, sliding into the seat across from him.

Harry didn’t look up. “Told you I was fine.”

Sirius studied him. The dark circles were lighter, but the stiffness in his shoulders hadn’t eased. “You’re running too hard. Chasing shadows isn’t going to change  ”

Harry cut him off with a weary, practised sigh, the kind that suggested this conversation had worn grooves into both of them over the years. “I’m not chasing anything. I’m doing my job.”

“You call what you did last night your job? You left in the middle of dinner.”

Harry finally met his eyes. Not angry, but something worse. Quiet, tired resolve. No room for argument. “If someone reports a possible sighting of Draco Malfoy, I have to check it out. That’s what Aurors do.”

Sirius leaned forward, lowering his voice. “You know that wasn’t Malfoy. You knew before you even left the table. You went to his funeral. ”

For a heartbeat just one Harry faltered. Something raw flickered across his features, an echo of the boy Sirius had held after Dumbledore’s death, shaking and blaming himself for burdens no child should have carried.

Then Harry blinked, and the mask slid neatly back into place.

“It doesn’t matter what I expected,” he said. “It matters that I follow the lead.”

Sirius exhaled through his nose. “At the cost of your own health?”

Harry shrugged small, humourless and reached for his tea. “I’m fine,” he repeated, soft but immovable, like a wall built brick by brick over years of necessity.

The kettle behind him gave a faint, unprompted rattle.

Harry didn’t even notice.

And Sirius could see it then with painful clarity: Harry wasn’t dismissing concern out of stubbornness or pride. He simply didn’t know how to live without carrying a burden. He didn’t know how to stop running, because he didn’t know who he was when he stood still.

“Right,” Sirius murmured, leaning back. “Fine.”

But as he watched Harry gather his papers, already bracing himself for another day too heavy for one person to carry, Sirius felt that familiar twist of worry take root again. Because Harry wasn’t fine, not really and the worst part was that he genuinely believed he was.

Sirius stayed at the kitchen table long after Harry had left through the Floor for  the Ministry, staring at the empty mug Harry had left behind. The air still hummed faintly, a soft, lingering vibration like someone had brushed against the wards without meaning to.  It disappeared as quickly as it came, but Sirius felt the prickle of unease settle deeper in his chest.

He needed to talk to someone who understood the shape of Harry’s silences.

Remus, then. Always Remus.

Sirius found Remus in the guest room at Grimmauld well, his room by now, the windows cracked open to let in a mild breeze, and half-corrected essays scattered across his desk. Remus didn’t look up at first; he only sensed Sirius in the doorway and sighed the way he always did when he knew the conversation wouldn’t be simple.

“What’s happened?” Remus asked, setting down his quill.

“It’s Harry,” Sirius said, dropping into the chair opposite him. “He’s burning himself out.”

Remus’s expression softened into a familiar mix of concern and resignation. “He has been… stretched thin lately. But he insists everything is under control.”

Sirius barked a humourless laugh. “That’s what he told me too. Twice. Once last night when he staggered in, and once this morning while pretending tea counted as a full meal.”

Remus sat back, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “He’s always struggled to believe he deserves rest.”

“Struggled?” Sirius scoffed. “He treats rest like it’s a curse.”

A quiet settled between them, steady and familiar. The fire shifted in the grate, sending a soft glow across the room. Remus studied Sirius over the rim of his mug, not pressing, only waiting in that patient way of his that often drew things out without trying.

“He has not said much to me lately,” Remus said. “Not about the work, at least. Did he go out on another Malfoy lead last night.”

Sirius felt his mouth tighten. “Yes. A vague sighting near the viaduct.”

Remus nodded as if that matched something he had already suspected. “He always takes those. Even when he knows they will lead nowhere.” His gaze drifted toward the window, following some quiet thread of thought. “It looks less like stubbornness and more like he still feels responsible for all of them. The students, I mean. The ones who fought beside him. Malfoy included, whether he admits it or not.”

Sirius felt a flicker of recognition at that. Remus went on, voice quiet.

“Harry carried a great deal through the war. More than anyone his age should have. Sometimes I think he still sees every student who stood with him as someone he was meant to look after. Even now.”

Sirius rubbed a hand along his jaw, the unease from that morning settling again under his ribs. Remus’s gaze returned to him.

“He is not easy to read when he does not want to be,” Remus said. “He learned that young. If there is something he is carrying, he will not give it to us easily.”

Sirius let out a slow breath. The truth of it sat heavily. Remus set his mug down and folded his hands, considering him.

Remus noticed. He leaned back slightly, studying Sirius with that steady patience of his. “You have been chewing on something else. This is not just about Harry being tired.”

Sirius rubbed his thumb along the arm of the chair, looking toward the window as if the light there might steady him. “I kept thinking back to those summers,” he said. “Harry and Malfoy working together. Snape never far from them.”

Sirius’s jaw tightened. He looked toward the window as though the morning light might untangle what he was reluctant to say. For a moment he seemed undecided, then he shifted in his chair.

 “I tried talking to Snape,” he said finally. “Right before term ended.”

Remus’s eyebrows lifted, more in surprise than sharpness. “You spoke to him.”

“I thought he might know something,” Sirius said. The defensiveness in his voice was not aimed at Remus. “Harry and Malfoy spent those summers together. Merlin knows what went on during those tutoring sessions, and Snape was never far from them. If Harry walked away with something on his mind, if something happened, I thought it might explain why he is so fixed on Malfoy even now.”

Remus’s expression went still, the kind of stillness that meant he was weighing several possibilities at once. “And what did Severus say.”

“And Snape went absolutely—” Sirius gestured vaguely, searching for a word that would not scorch the wallpaper, “off the rails. Would not even let me finish the question. Accused me of meddling, of inventing conspiracies. I swear he nearly blasted the door off its hinges throwing me out.”

Remus let out a quiet breath. “That sounds like Severus.” His tone remained even, though a troubled undercurrent threaded through it. “Did he offer anything useful at all?”

“Unless you count the insults about my intelligence, no.”

Sirius leaned forward slightly. “Remus, he reacted like a man with something he does not want touched.”

“Or like someone who does not care to revisit old memories,” Remus replied. There was no disagreement in his voice, only a measured consideration. “Whatever happened during those summers, Severus is determined to keep it buried.”

“Which is why it should not be,” Sirius said. “Harry is running himself ragged over Malfoy. And none of us, not Hermione, not you, not me, can get him to ease up. If Snape knows something and refuses to speak—”

Remus lifted a hand, quiet but firm. “Pushing Severus rarely gets answers. It usually gets a slammed door.”

A silence settled between them again, familiar as an old blanket. The fire shifted in the grate. Remus regarded Sirius over the rim of his mug with steady patience.

“He is avoiding us,” Sirius muttered.

“He is not avoiding us,” Remus said. “He is avoiding Harry. That is different.”

Sirius frowned. “Why.”

Remus set his mug down and considered the question for a moment. The lines at the corners of his eyes deepened, not with frustration but with a kind of tired understanding.

“Because Harry reminds him of too much,” Remus said. “Not only James. The war. Lilly. The choices he made. The things he cannot change, no matter how he turns them over in his mind. Being near Harry brings all of that with it.”

He paused, choosing his next thought with the care he always took in matters that touched old wounds.

some way. He has never handled that well. Not then, and certainly not now.”

“And we simply accept that,” Sirius said. “We sit here while Harry wears himself down because Snape cannot bring himself to speak.”

Remus met the spark of anger without flinching. “I am not suggesting we do nothing. I am suggesting we do not make things worse. There is a difference.”

Sirius paced once across the room, the movement abrupt and brief, then stopped. “He looked terrified,” he said again, quieter now.

Remus did not contradict him. He studied Sirius for a moment, the firelight catching in the lines of his face. When he spoke again, his voice was calmer, more searching. “That is not the only thing on your mind.”

Sirius’s breath caught briefly. He looked toward the window, where the streetlamps were beginning to glow through the dusk.

Sirius drew in a breath. He glanced toward the window where the streetlamps were beginning to glow through the gathering dusk. “He does not date,” he said.

Remus waited, giving him space.

Sirius’s expression shifted, thoughtful in a way that made Remus set his mug aside. “I keep thinking about James and Lily. They were so young when they found each other. It felt inevitable. Like the world had settled around them before they even realised it.” He gave a small shrug. “Harry is nothing like either of them in that way.”

“He had a different kind of youth,” Remus said quietly.

“Exactly,” Sirius replied. “Sometimes I think I expect things from him, because I watched James grow into them. Marriage. Partnership. Knowing what you want by twenty. Harry never had room for any of that.” He rubbed his thumb along the arm of his chair, the gesture slow and restless. “I suppose I want him to have what they had. But he is not James, and the life he lived was nothing like theirs.”

He shook his head, a small movement that spoke more of uncertainty than frustration. “I am not trying to push him toward anything. I just look at him and think he deserves someone who sees him as he is. Not a symbol. Not a saviour. Just Harry.”

“Plenty of people never settle with anyone,” Remus said. “There is nothing wrong with that.”

“I know. Truly. But it is more than that.” Sirius leaned back, his voice low. “He barely goes anywhere that is not his office or a crime scene. He spends time only with Ron and Hermione. He comes home, eats, sleeps, and then does it all again. His whole world has narrowed to corridors and obligations.”

Remus absorbed that in silence, his expression turning more serious.

“He steps away from everything,” Sirius continued. “Not just from romance. From anything ordinary. As if wanting something simple would be reckless.”

“Maybe he has not met someone he trusts enough,” Remus said at last.

“Maybe,” Sirius allowed. “Or maybe he thinks he is not meant to want anything.”

Remus did not argue. He watched Sirius with the quiet patience of someone who had known him half a lifetime.
“That worries you,” he said.

Sirius pressed his palms flat to the table. “He goes to these weddings and comes home looking as if he is standing outside a door everyone else can walk through.” His voice roughened. “He deserves a life that is more than getting by.”

Remus reached across the table and rested a hand lightly on Sirius’s wrist. “The war left its mark on him.”

“It left its mark on all of us,” Sirius said.

“Yes,” Remus replied. “But Harry spent his childhood in it. Long before he understood what he was being asked to face.”

They let the thought settle between them.

Remus spoke again after a moment. “He moves forward. He works, he laughs, he tries. But part of him still expects the world to turn hard without warning. It makes wanting things feel uncertain.”

Sirius sank back into his chair. “I thought when it was finally over, he would be free of all that.”

Remus shook his head slightly. “War ends on paper, not in people.”

Sirius looked down at the floor, the anger gone from his expression, leaving only a worn grief.

After a long pause, Remus set a steady hand on his shoulder. “We cannot change what shaped him. But we can make sure he does not have to face the weight of it by himself.”

Sirius closed his eyes briefly. “I just want him to know he is allowed to want something good for himself.”

“He will,” Remus said. “When it feels safe to him.”

The fire settled into a low, even glow. The quiet that followed was softer than before, though it lingered with its own heaviness.

Remus’s hand remained on Sirius’s shoulder a moment longer before he rose and gathered the scattered essays. “Come get some rest,” he said. “Tomorrow will come soon enough.”

 

Sirius nodded, though he did not follow immediately.

He remained by the hearth long after Remus had gone, staring into the slow pulse of embers. Grimmauld Place hummed faintly around him, the old magic in the walls shifting with its nocturnal restlessness. The house had developed habits these past years, quiet reactions he had learned to read like weather.

Sirius rose at last and crossed the darkened hall toward the staircase. As he climbed, the banister warmed faintly beneath his palm, the wood answering his touch with a subtle vibration that traveled up into his wrist.

The house was listening.

He paused outside Harry’s door, not near enough to intrude, but close enough to feel the faint wash of Harry’s magic through the barrier of stone and spell. It was unsteady, like a tide pulling too far from shore.

“You’re not as hidden as you think,” Sirius murmured under his breath, though he did not know whether he was speaking to the house or to the boy beyond the door.

The magic did not answer.

But it shifted.

The magic did not answer.
But it shifted.

From inside the room came the faintest sound, barely more than the scrape of a page or the shift of someone turning in bed. It was small, ordinary, the kind of noise a house usually swallowed without notice. Yet Sirius felt something ease in him at the proof that Harry was awake, steady, and close enough to reach if he needed anything.

Sirius lingered a moment longer outside Harry’s door. The corridor was dim, lit only by the muted glow of a single lantern at the far end, its light catching on the carvings that lined the walls. The house breathed gently around him, as if keenly aware of the thoughts turning over in his mind.

He touched the doorframe with two fingers, a brief, steady gesture. Then he turned away and made his way to his own room, the floorboards creaking softly beneath him in a rhythm he knew by heart.

His room felt cooler than the hallway. He set aside his wand, dimmed the lamps, and sat on the edge of the bed. For a while he simply listened to the quiet, to the way Grimmauld shifted its weight like an old dog settling into sleep.

He could not solve Harry’s exhaustion overnight. He could not unmake the years that had shaped him, nor chase down the ghosts Harry refused to name. But he could keep watch. He could make sure the boy never had to face the dark alone again. It was a small promise, but it was the one Sirius knew he could keep.

A soft hum traveled through the floorboards, barely perceptible. Sirius lifted his head. The house rarely stirred this late unless someone moved through its wards.

But nothing came.

Just the faint, settling murmur of a place listening to the people who lived inside it.

Sirius lay back at last, drawing the blankets up against the chill. His eyes drifted to the ceiling, to the hairline cracks that caught the dimmest traces of starlight through the high window.

Tomorrow would come as it always did. Harry would rise, get ready, and set out for work with that same determined calm. Sirius would be here, doing what he always had, keeping an eye on him in the small ways that mattered.

He closed his eyes.

And somewhere deep in the old bones of Grimmauld Place, a small shift passed through the quiet. It was not magic rising or anything dramatic, only the faint awareness of a house that sensed it was not as full as it ought to be. Grimmauld had been shaped for generations to recognise the people who belonged to it, to settle itself around those it claimed.

Tonight, the silence carried a different shape, as if the house were holding space for someone who had not yet arrived. Not a summons, not a longing. Simply an old structure knowing it was meant to welcome more than the footsteps it currently held.

The feeling was light, almost absentminded, like a chair left with one place unfilled at the table.

Chapter 3: Unseen Threads

Notes:

See chapter one for disclaimer and warnings.

Chapter 3.

Unseen Threads.

Grimmauld Place carried a certain heaviness in summer, a dense, motionless heat that made the curtains cling to their rails and the old floors creak, even when no one crossed them. Sirius remembered summers here as suffocating, the air thick with dust and old magic, but now the house felt different. Lived in. Harry’s presence had done that. There were plants on the kitchen windowsill, Auror files perpetually occupying the dining table, and the faint, homey scent of tea and polish lingering in the halls. It was not cheerful, exactly, but it was no longer hostile. 

It was almost a home.

The change ran deeper than furnishings. Grimmauld had once breathed like a wounded thing, wheezing dust from its corners and coughing up old curses from behind the walls. Sirius had grown up learning which stair treads hissed, which portraits sneered with poisoned affection, which doors closed a little too eagerly behind him.

Now that darkness felt altered. Not gone, not softened into anything bright, but reshaped. The magic no longer pressed outward like a threat. It hummed instead, low and steady, like an animal learning that it no longer needed to bare its teeth.

Sirius felt it each time he crossed the threshold. The sconces lit themselves in a hesitant ripple. The floors creaked under his boots with a tone that felt less like warning and more like recognition. Even the kitchen door, once infuriatingly stubborn, swung open at his touch with a grumble that felt almost affectionate.

Harry’s presence had done most of the healing. Sirius saw it in the shimmer along the banister when Harry ran a hand over the rail, and in the way curtains edged back just slightly when he entered a room, as if straining to offer him more light. Once, Sirius could have sworn the floorboards chuckled when Harry tripped on the stairs. The old portraits were gone now, burned and banished and unbound, leaving behind clean walls and a strange, echoing quiet. At first that absence had been unsettling. Sirius had half expected Walburga’s shriek to break the silence at any moment, but the quiet that replaced it was not empty. It was spacious, the kind of silence a room could inhabit without feeling watched.

New magic lived here now: Harry’s, young and fierce, threaded through the corridors like faint lines of gold and Sirius’s own, older and rougher, anchored the wards and settled into the bones of the place like warmth beneath skin. 

And on quiet nights, when the lamps dimmed and the air stilled, he felt the house settle around them like a great creature curling into sleep, its breath a low, warm hum in the walls. He would never admit it aloud, but he liked it.

Grimmauld Place was no longer a monument to Black cruelty. It had become something else, something that hovered awkwardly between refuge and companion, alive in a way it had never permitted itself to be before. Loyal. Watchful. Content, in its own strange fashion, to live with them.
Sometimes Sirius woke to the sound of the house pacing below, restless as something trapped in a cage. Lamplight flickered as Grimmauld failed to settle.

It sensed Harry’s strain before Sirius reached the bottom of the stairs. The lamps dimmed, flared again, and the air thickened with uneasy magic. Sirius paused on the steps, hand on the banister, as the house drew inward around him.

When Harry threw himself onto the sofa after a long day, the sitting room shifted. A chair appeared where none had been before, positioned not for comfort but as if the room expected someone else.

Sirius lingered, uneasy, and let the feeling settle.

That was when the front door opened, and Harry came home.

The front door opened with a reluctant groan. Harry slipped inside, shoulders bowed beneath an invisible weight, boots soaked through, cloak hanging heavy with rain. The hallway lanterns flickered in sympathy rather than warning. The magic in the walls stretched toward him like a creature nudging a wounded owner, uncertain how to help but unwilling to withdraw.

Harry brushed past it all without noticing.

Grimmauld noticed him.

The air warmed by a degree. The runner on the stairs smoothed itself beneath his feet. A soft hum pulsed through the floorboards, a muted welcome.

Sirius saw what Harry did not. Even Grimmauld. The house did not greet him as a guest, or even as its sole master, but as something incomplete that had once been whole. The wards responded out of proportion to the volume of his magic, surging with a force usually reserved for catastrophic intrusion.

For a moment, Sirius resented the gentleness of it, in the way the house seemed to ache for someone who refused to rest.

 

Three nights later, Harry stumbled through the front door well past two in the morning, long after Sirius had given up pretending he was not waiting. Harry froze when he saw the lamps blazing in the hall, then forced a smile that did not come anywhere near his eyes.

“Sorry,” he muttered, dragging a hand through his hair. “Lost track of time.”

Sirius leaned against the doorway, arms crossed. “Doing what? Your schedule said you were off by seven.”

Harry shrugged out of his cloak without meeting his gaze. “Paperwork ran over.”

Sirius did not bother disguising his skepticism. Harry’s hair was damp with sweat, his sleeves dusted with grime, and a faint bruise was already darkening along his jaw.

“Paperwork,” Sirius repeated flatly.

Harry’s lips twitched in something that might have been amusing, if it were not so exhausted. “You would be surprised.”

Before Sirius could press him further, the wall sconces flared bright white and snapped to darkness. For one suspended breath, the hall plunged into silent black. Then the lights steadied again, glowing warmer than before, as though trying to apologize.

Harry turned away. “What was that?” His tone carried genuine puzzlement.

The floorboards beneath him shivered like an animal flinching at a sudden noise.

Harry paused at the foot of the stairs. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, eyes unfocused. “It’s late,” he said, as if the statement explained everything.

“It’s two in the morning,” Sirius replied.

Harry huffed a tired breath that might have been a laugh. “Good night, then.”

“Night,” Sirius said, watching him too closely.

Harry climbed the stairs with slow, heavy steps, shoulders bowed, his magic trailing behind him in a frayed, restless pulse that neither of them acknowledged. Sirius watched until he vanished down the landing, teeth set, questions burning.

 

irius did not sleep that night. He lay in the dark with the faint hum of the house beneath him and the echo of Harry’s uneven magic still vibrating through the walls. Near four in the morning, a subtle restlessness pulled him from bed. Barefoot, he drifted down the corridor, guided more by instinct than thought.

Halfway along the hall, a thin line of lamplight spilled from the drawing-room door, standing slightly ajar.

Sirius paused.

Harry was inside.

He sat on the edge of the sofa, back hunched, elbows braced on his knees. For a moment, the pillows beside him seemed to fold inward.Two cups of tea stood on the table in front of him. His shoulders trembled in small, controlled jolts, as though he were containing something by sheer precision of will. In his hands, he turned a small object over and over, the metal catching the light with each movement.

A glint of silver cut through the shadows.

A cufflink.

Elegant. Expensive. Distinctively shaped.

It was not Harry’s.

Harry stared at it as if willing it to speak. Then, abruptly, he closed his fist around it and exhaled a sound Sirius could not name: not quite a sob, not quite a breath, but something torn from a place stripped of every pretence.

Sirius’s heart stuttered. He stepped back into the shadows before Harry could notice him, the sense of intrusion sharp and immediate. This was not meant for him. The moment was too bare, too fragile, and Harry had shown it to no one.

Through the narrow gap of the door, Sirius watched Harry press the heel of his hand to his eyes, the cufflink still clenched in his fist. His breathing hitched once, twice, then steadied with brittle precision. He pocketed the cufflink, rose, and left the room without looking back.

Sirius did not move until the floorboards upstairs whispered beneath Harry’s retreating steps.

Only then did he let himself breathe.

Whatever was wrong with Harry ran deeper than overwork or grief. It had a sharper edge, something personal and unresolved, and it was being carefully concealed.

Sirius stood there a long moment, weighing the cost of knowing against the risk of leaving it untouched. In the end, he chose to know.

 

By dawn, Harry was gone again.

Sirius found the kitchen empty, the house quieter than usual in the pale early light. He watched from the window as Harry strode down the front steps with his wand concealed in the sleeve of his robe, his jaw set with the expression of a man heading into battle even when the only thing on his schedule was a meeting with the Minister.

The unease did not lift when the door closed behind him.

Instead, it settled.

Sirius wandered the house without purpose for a time, his thoughts circling restlessly. Grimmauld was listening again, the old magic shifting with an alertness he had come to recognize. The air grew faintly taut as he approached the end of the upper corridor.

Harry’s door.

Sirius stopped before it, studying the plain wood as if it might offer explanation. He had no intention of spying, only to understand. Yet the sensation in the air felt wrong, and the memory of Harry’s shaking shoulders in the drawing room would not leave him.

He placed his hand on the door.

The wards were clean and meticulous, layered with the kind of precision Sirius recognized from years of watching Harry work. It was not paranoia. It was preparation. And that alone made Sirius’s stomach tighten. Harry warded files. He warded cabinets. He had even warded the teacup cupboard once, for reasons Sirius still did not understand.

It took all morning to unravel the enchantments. Sirius moved carefully, dismantling each layer without tripping the next. He had not expected the depth of it, or the control. Harry’s wards were precise, stacked with a discipline that spoke of power held deliberately in check.

Grimmauld leaned toward him as he worked, the walls subtly yielding, as though the house itself were weighing loyalty against protection. In the end, it allowed him through, not easily, but without force

The door opened with a soft click.

Sirius eased the door open and stepped into Harry’s room with the cautious precision of a man who had learned to move through dangerous spaces without trusting what his eyes first offered.

At a glance, everything was ordinary.

The bed was made with military neatness, the blanket folded with exacting care. A stack of reports lay squared on the desk beside a cold cup of tea. The Quidditch robe hung untouched from its peg. 

Sirius stood very still, cataloguing what he saw out of habit more than intent. No overturned furniture. No scattered papers. No visible spell residue. If this were a crime scene, it would have been dismissed as inactive with barely a glance.

For a moment, relief almost took him.

Then Grimmauld shifted.

The change was not dramatic. It was not even visible. The floorboard beneath Sirius’s foot warmed by the slightest degree, a pressure more felt than seen. The faint hum in the walls altered pitch, deepening in a way that tugged unpleasantly at the nerves. The curtain nearest the bed stirred, though the window was closed.

It was not alarm.

It was insistence.

Sirius’s hand closed slowly around his wand.

He scanned the room again, this time not as a godfather, but as an investigator trained to distrust the cleanest spaces first. His gaze moved in careful lines. Corners. Shadows. The undersides of surfaces. The edges of wards, too subtle to announce themselves.

The desk lamp flickered once.That was enough.

“Homenum revelio,” Sirius murmured.

The spell rolled outward in a controlled wave, thin and searching, brushing the air and every surface it touched with quiet authority.

For a breath, nothing happened.

Then the room resisted.

The air tightened, as if the space itself were bracing. The color of the walls dulled and wavered. A faint vibration passed through the floor. And then, like blood seeping through plaster, thin red lines began to surface through the illusion.

The glamour unraveled.

It did not fall apart in a rush. It peeled back with deliberate reluctance, thread by thread, layer by patient layer, until the ordinary room was stripped of its cover entirely.

Red spell-thread saturated the walls from floor to ceiling.

The room was layered with evidence. Photographs clipped at careful angles. Copies of Ministry records annotated in patient script. Maps of London folded and unfolded until the parchment had softened at the creases. Sighting reports. A meticulous sketch of the alley where Narcissa Malfoy had died, each brick and shadow rendered with quiet devotion.

Hundreds of strands crossed and recrossed the space with engineered precision, binding photographs, Ministry reports, witness statements, and hand-drawn maps into a single, relentless framework. Every connection had been rebuilt and reinforced, every possibility weighted.

All of it converged on one name.

DRACO MALFOY.

Sirius extended a hand and brushed one of the red threads with his fingers. It hummed beneath his touch, a taut, vibrating note stretched perilously close to snapping.

This was not an Auror’s case board.

There was no professional distance here. No attempt at emotional containment. Every line in the web was driven by reconstruction rather than investigation. Harry was not assembling facts so much as he was trying to rebuild the final months of a boy who had vanished without trace, farewell, and an empty grave.

The room felt too small all at once. The air pressed close and warm, the red threads pulsing faintly like veins beneath skin. Whatever had happened between Harry and Draco during those hidden summers had not ended with disappearance. It had carved itself into Harry deeply enough to reorder his entire inner world.

At the center of the web, pinned above the bed in silent prominence, lay a parchment in Harry’s unmistakable hand.

Where did he go?
What did I miss?
Where do I feel it strongest?

Beneath it rested the silver cufflink.

The serpent-shaped M caught the light with a dull, patient gleam.

Sirius took one step forward, then another, his pulse accelerating in a way that had nothing to do with exertion. This was not a cold case. This was not even a sanctioned investigation. There were no official seals, no controlled evidence trails, no limits. The work sprawled beyond regulation, beyond permission, beyond restraint.

It was the architecture of fixation.

His breathing roughened despite his effort to steady it. He reached out without quite deciding to and brushed one finger against a strand of red thread. It hummed beneath his touch with a brittle, overstrained tension that made his skin prickle.

Harry was not pursuing answers.

He was pursuing a single absence with everything he had.

Sirius’s gaze swept the room again, quicker now, the method in his movements beginning to fracture. The maps. The repeated locations. The way certain dates had been rewritten in darker ink, pressed so hard the parchment beneath had thinned. The sheer density of it made his chest tighten. There were no gaps. No pauses. No clear place where the work had been allowed to stop.

“Merlin,” Sirius whispered, the word scraped thin from his throat.

This wasn’t grief filed away. It was something that refused to be contained.

Whatever had bound Harry to Draco during those hidden summers had not faded with his disappearance. If anything, it had drawn inward, tightening in quiet, relentless turns, until it had threaded itself through everything Harry did when no one was watching.

And with a sudden, sick recognition, Sirius realized how long this must have been building without him seeing it for what it was.

Behind him, the house creaked.

The sound was low and uneasy, like wood settling under a weight it did not know how to carry.

Sirius turned slowly in the center of the room, the red web enclosing him on all sides, his pulse no longer steady in his ears.

A sound from below jolted him from the room’s oppressive stillness. A floorboard creaked on the lower level. Keys clinked faintly against ceramic. A tired breath drifted up the stairwell.

Harry was back.

Sirius swore under his breath and moved quickly. The glamour was restored in shallow, hurried layers. The red thread web withdrew from sight, though not cleanly. Magic clung stubbornly to the corners of the wall like cobwebs that refused to be brushed aside.

Footsteps ascended the stairs.

Sirius scanned the room for escape. The door was impossible. The window would announce him. The bed left no space for a man of his build. His gaze caught on the wardrobe at the far wall.

He slipped inside just as Harry’s shadow crossed the threshold.

The doors closed softly around Sirius, folding him into linen and wool and the faint, familiar trace of Harry’s soap. He barely had time to steady his wild, beating heart, before he felt it. A thin disturbance in the air where the illusion had not fully settled. The house was still waiting. Watching.

Panic spiked.

With one hand pressed flat against the inside of the wardrobe, Sirius flicked his wand in a tight, soundless motion. The glamour shuddered, resisted for a heartbeat, then slid back into place with a soft, whispering correction, like fabric smoothed over a bruise.

The hum of magic steadied. The house settled.

Through the narrow sliver of light between the panels, Sirius watched Harry enter the room, rain-dark hair curling faintly at the ends, shoulders bowed beneath the weight of a long night.

Harry crossed to the desk and sifted through a few papers with distracted fingers.

Then he stopped.

His posture stiffened. His hand hovered above the surface of the desk. For a terrible moment, Sirius thought he had sensed the disruption, the faint aftertaste of altered magic in the air.

Sirius did not breathe.

Harry swallowed. He closed his fingers around the cufflink and slipped it into his pocket with quiet deliberation. He stood with his back to the wardrobe for a moment, utterly still, his breath shallow in the silence.

Sirius felt the old terror rise in his chest. The memory of being hunted. Of being exposed.

At last, Harry exhaled. His shoulders eased by a fraction. Then he left the room.

Only when his footsteps faded down the corridor did Grimmauld release the tension it had gathered. The walls loosened. The floor gave a soft, almost worried creak.

Sirius remained hidden for several long seconds before easing the wardrobe door open. His knees trembled when he straightened, irritation and residual fear warring in his chest. He crossed the room quietly and restored the last traces of the glamour with shaking hands.

When he finally reached his own room, he locked the door both magically and by hand. He leaned against it as though bracing himself against an unseen weight.

This was no longer an ordinary worry.

What Sirius had seen in Harry’s room was deeper and more dangerous than anything he had been willing to name before. Not a passing fixation. Not exhaustion dressed up as duty. Something patient, something that had been allowed to grow without witness.

If Harry ever learned that Sirius had seen any of it, Sirius was not certain he would be forgiven.

He remained awake long after the house had gone still. Grimmauld’s familiar hum settled into its low nocturnal rhythm, but it no longer sounded like rest. It sounded like listening, like a held breath waiting to be released.

Somewhere beyond the walls, Harry’s magic moved, quiet and restless, as if the house itself were tracking it.

What Sirius had seen was not simply grief, nor merely exhaustion. It was devotion with nowhere safe to go, a wound that had learned to survive by staying open.

Sirius straightened slowly, already turning the problem over in his mind. He did not look toward Harry’s door again. Instead, his thoughts moved to the people who had known Harry the longest, who had seen him when Sirius had not. If there was a way into what Harry was carrying, it would be through them.

Chapter 4: Outside the Door.

Notes:

See chapter one for disclaimer and warnings.

Chapter 4.

Outside the Door.

 

The kitchen at Grimmauld felt heavier than usual that night, as though the room itself sensed they were not gathered for ordinary talk. Sirius paced from one end to the other without sitting, his hands braced at his hips, his breath held too tightly in his chest. Remus watched from one of the mismatched chairs, his forgotten mug cooling between his fingers. Hermione sat beside him, posture exact, her hands folded together on the tabletop. Ron lingered near the hearth, shifting his weight as if uncertain whether he ought to leave or stand his ground.

Sirius shifted his weight, uncertain whether he ought to leave or stand his ground.

At last, he stopped.

“I found something in Harry’s room.”

The words drew all of their attention at once.

Hermione leaned forward. “What did you find?”

Ron’s ears reddened. “What were you doing in Harry’s room?”

Sirius did not answer that. “He is not fine,” he said instead. “He is nowhere near it.”

Hermione frowned. “What did you see?”

“A wall covered in spell-thread,” Sirius said quietly. “Red lines everywhere. Maps. Ministry reports. Witness statements–.” 

Ron sighed impatiently. “Harry brings work home all the time. He always has. When we were both Aurors, half our kitchen was case files and bad tea. He does not switch off. He never learned how. That does not mean something is wrong.”

“This was not that,” Sirius said. “This was not a case spread out. It was everywhere. Notes over notes. Lines crossing back on themselves. No order I could see. Just accumulation.”

Ron frowned. “Harry’s never been tidy.”

“This was not untidy,” Sirius said. “It was relentless. Like he kept adding to it without stopping to clear any of it away.”

Ron looked down at the table, jaw tightening. “He still tells me he is all right.”

“There was no order to it,” Sirius said. “No filing, no timeline. Just layers. Threads crossing over each other. Notes added on top of notes.”

Hermione tapped the edge of the table once. “What was the case?”

Sirius hesitated. “Draco Malfoy.”

The name shifted the air in the room.

Ron leaned back in his chair. “Harry has had Malfoy cases before.”

“Not like this,” Sirius said. “This was not a file he was working through. It was a wall he kept adding to.”

Hermione nodded once. “How recent?”

“Ongoing,” Sirius said. “And not contained.”

Ron looked away.

Ron let out a short, uneasy breath. “So he cannot let Malfoy go. That much we already knew.”

“Ron,” Hermione said quietly.

Sirius spoke before Hermione could respond, his voice steady but intent. “Harry does not tell us when something is wrong,” he said. “Not when he thinks it will slow things down. Not when he thinks we will interfere.”

Ron’s expression tightened, not in anger, but with the uneasy recognition of something uncomfortably familiar.

“He has been like that since he was a child,” Sirius went on. “He learned early that the safest way through a problem was to carry it himself and keep moving.”

Hermione folded her hands in her lap. She was silent for a moment, gaze lowered, as if sorting through a long mental record rather than memories.

“If you want a starting point,” she said at last, “it was fifth year. That is when I first noticed it clearly. Before the DA. Before Umbridge closed in on the school. Whenever Draco entered a room, Harry would change. Not in anger. Not in rivalry. It was something quieter than that.”

She hesitated. “I did not have words for it then. Just that something shifted when Draco was around. Harry paid attention in a way he did not with anyone else.”

She exhaled softly. “Ron thought Harry wanted to hex him into dust. I thought Harry was trying to work him out.” Her gaze flicked toward the darkened hallway. “Looking back, I think he was already trying to stop something. I do not know if he knew what.”

Sirius felt the weight of that settle in his chest.

Hermione glanced at him briefly, then continued. “Sixth year was when it became obvious. The night Harry said, ‘I do not think he wants to do this.’ That was when I realized he was treating Draco the same way he treated us. He did not argue it. He did not explain it. He just did it.”

Her expression softened into something fond and strained. “That year, Harry stopped talking about Malfoy as someone to fight,” she said. “Not to him. To us. He stopped calling him names. He stopped assuming the worst. It was subtle, but it stuck.”

Ron shifted, guilt flickering across his expression. He spoke without lifting his eyes. “We did try to give Malfoy another chance. At first it even looked like he wanted to keep his head down. His own house made that year unbearable for him.”

Hermione nodded. “Yes. And Harry noticed. Even when he did not mean to.”

She went on more quietly. “That year, whenever Draco slipped, Harry clocked it. If Draco was sharp or cruel or hiding behind bravado, Harry would say things like, ‘He is under pressure,’ or ‘Something is going on.’ He said it so plainly that it unsettled me at the time.”

She traced her thumb along the rim of her teacup.

“And there was that Defence class,” she added after a moment. “The one where Harry lost control and Draco was badly hurt. I remember how shaken Harry was afterward. He would not meet our eyes. He kept asking whether Draco would recover, whether the curse would leave damage behind. It was more than simple regret.”

Sirius’s hands curled slowly against the tabletop.

“At the time, I thought he was projecting,” Hermione continued. “We were teenagers in a war. Everything felt louder than it really was.”

Sirius said nothing. He kept his gaze on the grain of the table, knowing his voice would not hold steady if he spoke.

She hesitated, then went on more quietly. “After Dumbledore died and Draco disappeared, Harry changed again. He went quiet. Pulled in on himself. We all told ourselves it was the weight of what was coming next. None of us looked past that.”

Her gaze returned to Sirius. “And Harry is carrying things he never dealt with then.” She paused. “Loose ends. Guilt. Questions that never had answers.”

Ron’s voice came out rough. “Harry is not dangerous. He is not falling apart.”

“No,” Sirius said. He met Ron’s eyes. “He is not.” His voice stayed level with effort. “But he is hurting. And hurt has a way of narrowing the choices you think you have.”

Hermione rested a hand on Ron’s arm.

Ron shook his head once. “We do not get to tell Harry how to cope.”

Hermione stood, not sharply, but with the quiet urgency of someone who had reached a point she could no longer sit past. “No,” she said. “But we do need to notice when he stops coping.”

“Malfoy was declared dead,” Hermione said. “There was a funeral. Harry said he did not believe it. He has been working the case ever since.”

Ron shook his head, his expression firm rather than angry. “Or it is exactly what Harry does when someone disappears and the trail goes cold. You know him. He does not walk away from loose ends. If there are rumours that Malfoy is still alive, he is going to follow them. That is his job, Hermione. And he is good at it.”

“And when has Harry ever been good at knowing when to stop?” Hermione asked quietly.

“Since when do we decide that for him?” Ron replied. “He tells me he is fine. Every time I ask. He does not sound broken, or desperate, or lost. He sounds like Harry. Tired, yes. Focused, yes. But he is not falling apart in front of me.”

Remus had been listening in silence. Now he shifted slightly in his chair. “Ron, Sirius did not say Harry had a few scattered files. He said it was an entire wall. That is not a habit picked up in the last few months.”

Ron’s jaw worked as he considered that. He did not argue it, but he did not yield either.

Sirius watched Ron carefully. “We are not saying he cannot do his job. We are saying he is carrying more than he admits to.”

Ron let out a breath through his nose. “All right. Maybe he is. When has he not been? That does not mean we confront him like suspects in an interrogation room.”

Hermione’s voice softened. “I suggested once that he speak to a mind-healer. I had just begun seeing one myself. He listened very politely, thanked me, and told me there was nothing wrong with him. He said he liked his work and asked what was wrong with that.”

Remus met her eyes. “And did you believe him?”

“I believed that he believed it,” she said.

The quiet after that settled more slowly.

Ron rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I just do not want him thinking we doubt him. He has spent his whole life being questioned and examined and doubted. I will not be one more person adding to that.”

Hermione stepped closer. “We are not trying to corner him, Ron. We are trying to understand what he is doing.”

Ron looked at her for a long moment. Then his shoulders eased slightly. “He is going to be angry.”

Sirius nodded. “He can be. I would rather face his temper than his silence.”

Hermione drew in a breath and returned to her seat. “Then we speak to him openly. No ambush. No accusations. Just the truth.”

Ron managed a faint, crooked smile. “After this, we will probably need a drink.”

“After this,” Sirius said, “we might need several.”

For a moment, the tension in the room softened, not gone but bearable in the familiar way of people who had faced worse together.

And yet Sirius’s thoughts kept drifting back to the red threads, the trembling magic, the silver cufflink in Harry’s hand. Whatever they said to him, he knew already that the truth they were walking toward would not be simple.

Grimmauld reacted first.

The change was slight, no more than a quiet tension passing through the walls, a subtle tightening of old beams and old magic that only those who had lived there long enough would have noticed. Hermione’s voice faltered in midsentence. Remus glanced toward the ceiling. Even Ron straightened as the floor beneath their feet gave a faint, unsettled shift.

“What was that?” Ron began.

Harry stood in the doorway.

At once the kitchen fell into a deeper stillness, not the ordinary hush of a room between words, but a held quiet, as though the house itself had drawn a careful breath. The lamps dimmed a fraction. The air grew dense, charged with an unease that did not yet know its shape.

Sirius felt the shift along his spine as keenly as a touch. Grimmauld’s magic recognized Harry before any of them spoke. The wood of the doorway tightened slightly, as if bracing. A low vibration moved through the pipes, uncertain, listening.

Harry looked at them all in turn. His face was pale, his expression too composed. It was the calm Sirius had learned to fear most, the stillness that came when anger had already taken hold.

“How long,” Harry asked quietly, “have you been talking about me?”

No one answered.

He took a step into the room. “Go on.”

Hermione’s breath caught. “Harry–”

“Do not,” he said.

Ron moved a little closer, careful, as he always was when Harry stood like this. “We were worried about you. That is all.”

Harry let out a short breath that might have been a laugh, but there was no warmth in it. His gaze shifted at once to Sirius.

“Is that why you were in my room?”

Sirius’s chest tightened. “Harry, listen to me.”

“No,” Harry said. His voice was steady, but something in it had hardened past restraint. “You do not get to tell me to listen. Not you.”

The kitchen seemed to draw inward around that quiet refusal. The floor beneath their feet tightened, boards settling with a low, uneasy creak. The lamps wavered, their light dimming as though the room itself had grown wary.

“You are doing what everyone has always done,” Harry went on. “Deciding what is best for me.”

The pipes gave a muted groan. A faint drift of dust fell from the rafters. None of it drew Harry’s notice.

“You went into my room,” he said, his voice lowering. “You crossed the only boundary I have left. You looked through my things and then you brought it to them as though I were something to be handled. Managed.”

Remus stepped forward a fraction. “Harry, Sirius did not intend to hurt you.”

Harry turned toward him. “I trusted him. And he decided that trust was optional.”

Sirius’s chest tightened. “Pup, that was not what I meant.”

“You do not get to soften it by using that name,” Harry said. His words were sharp now, but his hands were trembling at his sides. “You do not get to break into my room and pretend it was concern.”

Hermione rose slowly. “We are not telling you what to do. We are trying to understand what you have been working on.”

Harry looked at her then, something brittle passing through his expression. “You were talking about me,” he said. “And you did not think I could hear.”

Silence stretched between them.

“My entire life,” Harry said, more quietly now, “has been shaped by where other people thought I ought to stand. Dumbledore. The Ministry. Voldemort. Everyone moving me like a piece on a board they built.” His breathing grew unsteady. “And now you are doing it again.”

Ron shook his head. “We would not do that to you.”

“You already are,” Harry said. “You are standing here deciding what I can handle and what I cannot, as though I have not been making those choices for myself for years.”

The lamps dipped and brightened again, responding to a tension in the room none of them could quite name. For a strange moment, the house’s magic did not feel aligned to Harry’s path alone. It felt as if it were bracing for a second absence it could not name.

“I have given everything I had,” Harry said. “My childhood. My quiet. My blood. I have buried people I loved and ones I hardly knew, and I carry them whether I want to or not.” His voice faltered for a moment. “Do not tell me that I owe more than that.”

Sirius moved without thinking, one hand lifting in a helpless gesture. “Harry please.”

Harry stepped back as though the word had struck him.

“Don’t,” Harry said quietly. The word was not loud, but it carried with it a finality that stilled the room. 

Silence settled, broad and unrelenting. For a moment it looked as though Harry might speak again, as though something more dangerous and unguarded hovered just behind his composure. Then he drew it back. The familiar distance returned to his face. His shoulders straightened.

“If you want to help me,” he said, his voice flattened off its earlier edge, “then leave me alone.”

He turned and walked out of the kitchen. His footsteps rang once against the floor and then were gone up the stairs.

The house responded in its own unsettled way. The lamps flared and dimmed. The pipes groaned faintly behind the walls. The floor beneath their feet shivered, as though the magic of the place itself had been startled by the force of his passing.

Then the sounds faded.

Hermione sank back into her chair, one hand lifted to her mouth as she tried to steady her breathing. Ron stood unmoving near the hearth, his face pale, his gaze fixed on the empty doorway. Remus closed his eyes briefly, his head bowed as if collecting himself.

Sirius remained where he was for a long moment, his chest tight, the faint echo of Harry’s anger still vibrating through the room.

Then, quietly, he followed.

The staircase was dim, the air heavy with the lingering weight of what had been said. Grimmauld murmured uneasily beneath his steps, the low timbre of old wood and old wards stirring against one another. Sirius moved slowly, as if the house itself asked caution of him.

When he reached Harry’s door, he stopped.

It looked no different than it ever had. Closed. Ordinary. And yet the air around it felt dense with unsettled magic, as though the house had drawn a careful boundary there. The wards responded out of proportion to the volume of his magic, surging with a force usually reserved for catastrophic intrusion.

“Harry,” Sirius said softly.

There was no answer.

He lifted his hand and hesitated a breath from the wood. The wards responded at once, not with force, but with a firm and quiet resistance. A warning without anger. A request without words.

Sirius let his hand fall.

Even the house, it seemed, was asking him to wait.

He sank down against the wall opposite the door and sat there for a long while with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. Of all the things he had survived, of all the losses that had shaped him, nothing had struck as deeply as the look on Harry’s face in the kitchen. Not the anger. Not the accusation. The hurt beneath it.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, knowing Harry could not hear him.

Above him the house creaked softly, the sound not quite answering, but not dismissing him either.

At last Sirius lifted his head and looked once more at the door, at the faint hush of magic Grimmauld had gathered around it.

He did not try again.

It was not hostility that met Sirius’s touch.

It was restraint.

He let his hand fall and rubbed at his face, a tired breath slipping free. “I made a mess of it,” he said quietly to the empty corridor. “Again.”

Grimmauld did not answer in any way that could be called a reply. Still, the pressure in the air eased, just slightly, as though the house itself were loosening a careful hold. Not agreement. Not forgiveness. Only a kind of quiet acknowledgment.

Sirius closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall. He stayed there for a long time, keeping watch outside a room he no longer had any right to enter. The need to remain close warred with the understanding that he had already crossed too far.

As the night deepened, the lamps dimmed into their low, steady glow. The unsettled tremor of the house calmed into a slow, familiar rhythm. At last Sirius pushed himself upright, his joints stiff, and looked once more at the closed door.

“I am not backing off,” Sirius said. “Be angry if you want. I am still here.”

The house did not bar his way when he stepped back. It did not open the door for him either.

He turned down the corridor.

Halfway along, he found Remus seated in the shadowed doorway of the spare bedroom, knees drawn up, his hands resting loosely together in his lap. He had been waiting.

Neither of them spoke at first. Remus simply shifted and patted the floor beside him. Sirius sat down without a word.

They rested shoulder to shoulder in the quiet of the hall, two tired men in a house that had known more grief than sleep. After a time, Remus spoke.

“We will not force this,” he said. “We will be here when he is ready to look back.”

Sirius’s throat tightened. “And if he never does?”

“Then we remain,” Remus replied. “So that he always knows where to find us.”

Sirius bent his head in a small nod. They sat in silence after that, not speaking again.

Behind the closed door at the end of the corridor, Harry slept fitfully, held together by exhaustion and the quiet vigilance of a house that had learned to care in the only way it knew how.

And Grimmauld Place kept watch over all of them.

 

Notes:

Some additional content warnings are intentionally not included in the public tags in order to avoid major spoilers. This story deals with multiple forms of trauma and long-term emotional impact in a mature, character-driven way. This story contains themes related to post-war recovery, grief, and trauma, which are explored in a mature, character-driven manner. While the narrative ultimately centers on healing, found family, and slow-building connection, some subject matter may be emotionally challenging.

If at any point the material feels like too much, stepping away is always the right choice. 💛 Reader discretion is advised.

If you ever need more specific warnings for a particular chapter, you are always welcome to ask in the comments.

Thank you for trusting me with this part of the journey.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 2 of The Shape of What Was Lost