Chapter Text
SIRIUS BLACK EXONERATED
The wizarding world was shocked last summer when Sirius Black, convicted of the murder of thirteen with a single curse, became the first to escape from Azkaban. It received a second shock this afternoon when Black, finally accorded a trial, was exonerated by the Wizengamot in light of new evidence provided under Veritaserum by Peter Pettigrew, a supposed victim of Black's who was produced, alive and well, in June. Pettigrew confessed to the murders of which Black was accused. (For more information about Pettigrew's framing of Black and trial, turn to page six.)
Black expressed his relief that justice had been done, but didn't wish to dwell. Instead, he stated his plans to enjoy his newfound freedom, perhaps try out the latest racing broom, and spend time with his godson, Harry Potter, whose custody he recently was awarded and who he never before had a chance to know.
Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, has been resident for the past thirteen years with muggle relatives of his mother Lily Potter, nee Evans. Black did not comment on the suitability of this choice, saying only that he regretted that he wasn't able to take care of Potter himself as directed in the Potters' will. "But Harry's generously given me a second chance," he said, "And I intend to make it up to him as best I can."
Is a quiet life really all that's on Black's agenda? Ever since his grandfather's death in 1992, Black has been the heir to a substantial fortune and a hereditary seat on the Wizengamot - though unable to make use of them in Azkaban. Now freed and exonerated, Black has become the heir to no small amount of speculation as well...
Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived and godson of Sirius Black, frowned at the article he had already read some fifteen times in the past three days. Sirius had said to him, too, that he intended to make up for the absence which had been in no way his fault; but knowing he had said it to a reporter for the Daily Prophet made a difference somehow. He also hadn't said the part about the second chance to Harry.
His chest felt tight. Did Sirius really think Harry would blame him for being wrongfully imprisoned for twelve years?
He would get a chance to ask him later today, for Sirius would soon be arriving in Privet Drive to pick him up. Harry would leave the Dursleys for the final time that morning, a fact he could scarcely believe. It seemed flatly impossible; he felt certain that any minute now he would receive a letter with some new disaster, or Aurors would swoop in and take Sirius back to prison, or Dumbledore would inform him it was not allowed.
He had packed his things reluctantly, feeling as though he was bringing down bad luck, last night. It was amazing to him that he had been able to keep his belongings with him in his room for the last month: but the Dursleys were in a good mood, a very good one indeed, at the prospect of seeing the last of Harry forever.
Uncle Vernon in particular had immensely enjoyed sneering at Harry, for he had rapidly recognized Sirius as the subject of Muggle alerts about a dangerous criminal the previous summer. "Suppose you're sure he won't murder you in your bed, boy?" he chuckled. "Well, it's no skin off our backs!"
Only Aunt Petunia did not seem entirely thrilled. Harry supposed she was thinking that without him around, she would have to do the gardening, cleaning and cooking herself. He suspected the quality of the housework at number 4, Privet Drive was about to suffer.
Harry looked at his watch. It was nearly ten o'clock in the morning now; Sirius was due any minute. He wanted to rush down the stairs to the front hall to wait - but he found himself curiously unable to move, picturing the look on Uncle Vernon's face if Sirius did not arrive at all. Harry was only too able to imagine what he would say about how unwanted Harry must be, by even his godfather.
A very load roar came from the street, so loud that the windows shook. Hedwig hooted unhappily. Harry leapt to his feet and went to the window.
A motorbike had come to a halt, just in front of the house at the edge of the drive. As Harry watched, breathless, a figure in jeans and a black leather jacket swung off the bike, tucked his helmet under his arm, and began the walk up the drive past Aunt Petunia's begonias.
It was Sirius. Harry leapt to his feet at last and pelted down the stairs, taking them two at a time, and flung the door open just as Sirius reached it. He beamed at him.
Sirius beamed back for a moment. "Harry!" he said, and rather to his astonishment, Sirius swept him into a tight hug.
Then he said, "What happened to your clothes?" looking somewhat taken back.
Harry was staring himself. It was hard to believe it had only been a few weeks from the change in Sirius. He was still thin, and his cheeks were gaunt; but he was now handsomely thin instead of skeletal. His skin was a more usual color for skin to be, and his hair was tied back and appeared well-groomed, if windswept.
Harry tore his eyes from Sirius' face, remembering as he did that Sirius had asked a question. "Dudley happened to them," he said. He was dressed, as usual in the muggle world, in his cousin's cast offs. As Dudley was a great number of sizes larger than Harry and not particularly gentle with his belongings, this gave the impression that Harry was dressed in a secondhand, well-used circus tent.
Of course, Sirius had only seen Harry in Hogwarts robes before.
"Dudley," Sirius repeated, eyebrows raised. "Your cousin?"
At that moment, Dudley himself emerged from the living room and stopped, clearly torn by the appearance of Harry's godfather.
On the one hand, Sirius was a wizard, and Dudley knew his parents despised magic; his own previous encounter with it had resulted in a pig's tail which had to be surgically removed. On the other hand, Sirius had arrived on the back of a very loud motorbike, and proved to be dressed not in wizarding robes or something like Hagrid's great overcoat, but in denims and black leather, with a long black ponytail. In short, Harry knew Dudley would be thinking, he appeared to be cool. Harry had never before been associated with anyone cool.
Harry's aunt and uncle, following Dudley into the front hallway, were nowhere near as interested. "You'll be Black?" Uncle Vernon said, dubiously.
Harry was briefly concerned. It had occurred to him before that when he and Sirius had last met, Sirius had been in the process of attempting to murder the man who had betrayed Harry and his parents to Lord Voldemort when Harry was a baby, and while Harry had been able to persuade Sirius to turn Peter Pettigrew in instead, he had shown definite signs of being infuriated by, say, Professor Snape's attitude towards Harry. Would there be a fight? Exonerated or not, Harry felt the last thing Sirius needed was to be promptly taken in again for cursing a muggle.
He apparently did not need to worry, at least not yet. "Yes," Sirius said, and gave an astonishingly polite smile to Uncle Vernon, extending his hand. "Sirius Black, Harry's godfather. It's a pleasure to meet you, ah..."
"Vernon Dursley," Uncle Vernon said, visibly distressed that he had been put in a position to have to touch Sirius' hand. He did this as quickly as possible. He made no move to introduce Aunt Petunia.
"And Petunia," Sirius said, and here Harry could see that his smile was somewhat strained. "We've met."
"I recall," Aunt Petunia snapped, crossing her arms in an attempt to be entirely clear she would not be shaking Sirius' hand herself.
"Well," Sirius said, when neither of them made any move to speak. "I'll soon be off with Harry. Shall I get your trunk while you say goodbye?"
Sirius knew that Harry had leapt at the chance to live with his godfather, a wizard he had never before met, who had at the time been in the course of attempting to commit the murder he'd been incarcerated for more than a decade previously. He had glimpsed Harry last summer in the process of running away from Privet Drive in the aftermath of some rather alarming accidental magic during a family argument.
However, Harry had not chosen to mention any other details about his life at Privet Drive as of yet. It seemed rather pointless, for one, when he was about to be leaving forever; and he did not wish Sirius to believe he was whining.
"Yeah," Harry said. "Thanks, Sirius. It's the bedroom on the left."
Sirius clumped up the stairs. Harry, unfortunately, was left to make eye contact with his relations.
"He's definitely taking you for good," Uncle Vernon said, for approximately the twentieth time. "Not a visit, not a trial run."
"Yes, Uncle Vernon," Harry said, imagining what it would be like to shut the door for the very last time, and know he never had to come back inside.
"Because if he decides he's had it with you, you're not coming back. I won't have it. You'll have to stay at that school of yours. You've sponged off us for thirteen years, and been nothing but trouble the entire time--"
There was a thunk from the stairs, and Harry realized, to his horror, that Sirius had been coming back down them with his trunk, and must have heard at least the last sentence or two of this.
Uncle Vernon rapidly stopped talking.
"Ah, Harry," Sirius said, voice still remarkably calm. "Why don't you take Hedwig out and let her know where we're going? She can get a chance to stretch her wings. You have the address from my last letter."
Harry looked warily between Sirius and his aunt and uncle, but decided that Sirius was unlikely to jeopardize his freedom at this moment while not in a rage. He went up to get Hedwig, tarrying some on the landing to eavesdrop; but Sirius must have put up a silencing charm, because he didn't hear a word from downstairs.
It was evident that there had been shouting when he came back down. Sirius was slightly out of breath, and Uncle Vernon had gone purple. Aunt Petunia's lips were pressed very thin, and her face was white.
"Good, you've got everything?" Sirius said, and when Harry nodded. "Excellent. It's a long drive, so we'd better get going. Let me just shrink your trunk."
There was no further mention of Harry saying goodbye; and taking his last walk down the drive to the motorbike felt exactly as good as he had imagined.
It wasn't too far a drive, in fact; they were going to London, and relatively directly at that. They were in the city, idling at a stoplight, when Sirius turned his head and called, "What do you think about stopping for some lunch, Harry?"
"Sounds good," Harry managed to get out, before the light turned and they roared off again.
Riding as a passenger on a motorbike was an interesting experience. Harry suspected he might have liked it rather a lot if he was driving and in control of it.
Sirius shouted several queries about what kind of food he'd like on the bike, but Harry only buried his face in Sirius' shoulder and pretended he couldn't hear. A problem had just occurred to him: he had bought muggle food only once, on the disastrous zoo trip in which he'd vanished the glass on a boa constrictor's enclosure, and even then the Dursleys had only conceded to get him anything because it would have looked very funny not to once the woman in the van had asked. They had chosen for him.
He had also been in the Three Broomsticks, but students always ordered the same thing there; and he paid for himself. How exactly were you supposed to choose when an adult was paying for you, but one who was in charge of you and actually liked you? What kind of restaurant would Sirius bring them to? He supposed it at least couldn't be anywhere too posh, not with Sirius' clothing.
"Into the alley, quick," Sirius said when the bike was parked. Puzzled, Harry complied; he pulled his wand and gently tapped Harry's shoulder. Dudley's immense shirt and trousers shrank to a more reasonable size immediately.
"I'd have done it sooner but I thought it was best to get out of there before Lily's sister started screaming," Sirius said. "We'll get you some that aren't castoffs soon, but that should be good enough for lunch. Still no opinion about the food?"
"No," Harry said. "When did you meet Aunt Petunia?"
"At your parents' wedding, although James had seen her a few times and given us all some warning," Sirius said, leading him back onto the sidewalk. "Time hasn't improved her. I wouldn't have said it was possible but if anything she's gotten worse..."
They were in a cluttered, crowded street with numerous restaurants and small shops and a great many people. Harry had to focus on keeping up with Sirius. Still, this could hardly avoid grabbing his attention. "She went to their wedding?"
"She'd never have missed the chance to make snide comments," Sirius said dryly. "If she hadn't gone she wouldn't be able to complain. Curry?"
"Sounds great," said Harry gamely. He had never had curry; the Dursleys did not approve of foreign food. He thought he did rather well, watching Sirius surreptitiously as he perused the menu and ordering something that cost a little less than Sirius's choice. Surely chicken couldn't be too bad.
But when the waitress was gone, Sirius smiled a strange, knowing and sad smile at him. "You've never been in a muggle restaurant before, have you?"
Harry's face felt hot. "How'd you know?"
"James and I watched Remus about that hard the first time he took us to one - he's a halfblood, but he grew up mostly in the muggle world when he wasn't at Hogwarts, of course they aren't prejudiced against werewolves the same way. The Dursleys never bothered to take you out?"
Harry looked down at the tablecloth. It seemed that he was going to be hard put not to risk whining. "They mostly paid attention to Dudley," he said.
"I saw the cat flap in the door," Sirius said. "And all of the locks on the outside."
Harry wasn't certain what to say to this.
"Listen," Sirius said after a moment. "I'm not saying this to embarrass you. If anything, they remind me a lot of my parents."
Harry looked up, startled. "Your parents?"
Sirius smiled thinly. "They used to punish us by stripping all of the belongings out of our rooms - including clothing - and leaving us locked in for weeks. Sometimes they wouldn't let our house elf feed us, either... Anyway, when I was around sixteen I had enough, I ran away and James's parents took me in. They treated me like a son." Sirius's eyes were distant. "I'd never experienced anything like it before. I won't judge you for it, Harry. It's okay to ask questions if we're doing something new."
This was not anything Harry had expected to hear from his godfather, and it took a moment to work out how to answer. "They took your clothes?" he said, softly because a large family was filing into the next booth, but furiously.
"They're all dead now," Sirius said, simply. "Mostly nastily. My family were very Dark wizards, about as Dark as a family can go, and that doesn't tend to lead to good ends. Well, I suppose my cousins are still alive. At least Andromeda got out. I should look her up sometime soon."
Harry imagined for a moment the far future, perhaps twenty or thirty years from now, saying to someone without any particular feeling that the Dursleys were all dead now. It was hard, harder to imagine even than walking away from Privet Drive forever had been.
He realized he had not had any real idea there were other children like him. He had always supposed that the Dursleys, or at least his situation, were unique. That seemed strange now. The world was full of people like the Dursleys, people who were mean and bullying, and many of them had children.
"You have cousins?" he said. "What are they like, what are they doing now?"
"Well, Andromeda's daughter had her last year at Hogwarts in your first - I hear she's in Auror training now. You'll have heard at least one of the others. I understand Narcissa Malfoy has a boy in your year--"
Harry choked on his drink. "You're cousins with Malfoy's mother?"
"I told you my family was very Dark," Sirius said, voice amused.
This was bizarre. "But the first sister, Andromeda, she's not a supporter of Voldemort?"
"No, it's one of the few things I know about her life now. She was disowned when I was eight."
"Well, I'd like to meet her, when you get back in touch," Harry said, hoping this was the right thing to say. It seemed to be; Sirius smiled at him, and then the food arrived and he wanted Harry to try everything on the table to see what he liked.
"So where are we staying?" Harry asked, some time later. "Do you have a house?" It was one of the things he remembered asking Sirius, incoherent with joy, before they had gotten up to the castle with Pettigrew and everything had happened very, very fast.
"I do - two actually, now, but Grimmauld Place isn't fit for habitation. The stuff my family left in it..." Sirius laughed darkly. "But I bought one when I inherited some gold from my uncle, sixth year, and it needs some fixing up but it's livable. Dumbledore thinks - well, a lot of things, but one of the few helpful things he said was that he thought we should stay in the muggle world for now. I agree, I know who's going to want to come calling on me now that I'm out of prison and I'd rather they not try to curse my godson if he answers the door."
"You just - bought a new one when you were still in school?" Harry remembered the Prophet article. "You're rich, aren't you?"
"Rather, I suppose. My grandfathers died while I was in Azkaban, so I'm not used to it anymore - my uncle left me some gold, but nothing like what the rest of the family had. I thought about waiting and getting the place fixed up first, but you were very clear about wanting to come as soon as possible." Sirius looked at Harry intently. "I'm glad I listened."
Harry felt a different sort of heat in his chest, something warmer and softer than his earlier embarrassment. Uncle Vernon's speculation aside, Sirius did want him.
"Thanks," he said, awkwardly. "Wait, what did Dumbledore say that wasn't helpful?" Sirius seemed to mean he was angry.
A shadow came into Sirius's face again, and he looked much older, although not so bad as before, when he had been on the run for a year. "A lot of things. What it came down to is that he wanted you to stay with the Dursleys."
"He - what?"
"He had some reasons, but they're nothing we should talk about here - I'll tell you at the house. Don't worry, I won't listen to him, and he can't get your custody from me. My family is doing more for me dead than they ever did alive, even before I ran away.
"Fudge desperately wants to make amends for throwing a Black in Azkaban without a trial for more than a decade. If it ever looks close, I'll pay for a new wing in St. Mungo's or the Ministry building and it will go away." Sirius rubbed his temples. "I've wished the Ministry had a few principles more than once in the past. But this one time, that will be helpful."
For the first time, it seemed plausible that Sirius was closely related to Draco Malfoy.