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The walls of his cell are bare. They are made of cold, damp stone, and there is a perpetual chill in the air that has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the Dementors that stand guard outside the bars of his cell. That is not to say that it isn’t cold—it is always cold at Azkaban, and his tiny, seaward window lets in an icy wind no matter the season. It is freezing in his cell, especially so through the thin, grey, prison-issue robes that he is wearing. The Ministry keeps them, the wizarding world’s criminals, in the most discomfort possible without killing them.
Sirius does not care. He deserves this, he thinks. James is dead, and Lily is dead, and he stands convicted of their deaths. That isn’t precisely right, because Sirius wasn’t their Secret-Keeper as everyone assumed, but it is close enough.
Sirius was the one to suggest that James and Lily change Secret-Keepers. Everyone knew of the close relationship between Sirius Black and James Potter; everyone knew that James Potter would trust him with his life, and that of his family. Everyone expected Sirius to be the Secret-Keeper, and therein lay the trick—even if Sirius was cornered, even if he was tortured for information, and even if he was killed, he would not be the Secret-Keeper and James and Lily would have been safe. No one, Sirius thought, would have ever believed Peter to be the Secret-Keeper.
Little had he known that Peter had been the spy all along.
James. Lily.
Sirius turns his face to the bitter wind blowing in from his cell window. It is winter, and the salt sea air is cold enough to suck his breath away. How could he have done this to James, his best friend since their first trip on the Hogwarts Express, his brother who had effortlessly and endlessly given him everything before he could think to ask? Or to Lily, who had been…
There are no words to describe Lily.
James had been his brother—if not one by blood, one in spirit, but Lily had been something else. Sirius knows all too well what James had seen in Lily, because one would have had to be blind not to see it. Lily shone, the brightest star in the sky. She was fierce, passionate, and brave, but every Gryffindor girl had those qualities in abundance. What had made Lily stand out was her kindness, a bone-deep sensitivity that had her defending all and sundry, against budding Death Eaters and the Marauders alike. She was an ardent defender for those that needed it, and often for those that didn’t deserve it. Even when she had stood opposite them, Sirius hadn’t been able to help admiring her.
But James had been in love with Lily Evans since almost their first year, and James came first. James always came first. Lily could have been his destined soulmate and for James, Sirius would have refused it. Because James was his brother, and there was nothing he would not have done for James.
And now they are dead, James and Lily both.
It’s his fault. He remembers that dreadful moment—that final, choked Patronus message, the silver stag that he could never mistake, saying that he needed to come, and quickly, then the sound of breaking wood. Sirius has never moved so quickly as he did that night, grabbing the first clothes he could find and his wand, but still, he was too late.
He remembers the crackle of fire from the second floor, and he remembers racing into the house only to find James dead on the floor. He remembers the smell, of smoke and ash and Dark magic, and he remembers the numbness. He remembers the roaring in his ears, the simple knowledge that James is dead, he is dead dead dead and Lily is almost certainly the same way, and he remembers the single percolating thought that ran through his head: Peter must pay.
And he remembers his hunt, and his failure.
He failed. He had failed, and the knowledge burns in his chest, a hard knot that reminds him with every waking moment of his failure. He repaid James and Lily for near a decade of their love and kindness with their deaths, and he hadn’t even been able to avenge their deaths.
There is nothing for him anymore. He is in Azkaban, and it matters nothing that he sees his cousin Bellatrix, the Lestranges, even young Barty Crouch march past his cell when they’re all captured and sentenced to the infamous prison. It means nothing to him that James and Lily’s deaths mean the victory of the Wizarding world, that Voldemort is, if not dead, certainly gone.
Without James and Lily, there is nothing for him, and he wants, desperately, for everything and nothing at all. He wants James and Lily back. He wants his old life back. He wants a world where he didn’t screw it all up—one where he didn’t make James change Secret-Keepers, one where he identified Peter as the spy before it was all too late, one where he had avenged his friends.
He wants a world where he doesn’t hurt, every second of every day with nothing to distract him from his never-ending thoughts. He wants oblivion, he wants nothingness, he wants the peace of silence even if the price is madness.
He wants to be somewhere, anywhere else. He wants a world where magic never existed, where nothing he knew ever existed, where Voldemort was only a storybook horror.
Days blur, and he lets them. There is nothing different in the unchanging landscape of Azkaban, no newness to break up the daily monotony. He is alone with his thoughts, with his ever-present misery and loss and his dead wants, and when the madness comes, he goes willingly.
He wakes up, and he is somewhere else.
It is nighttime, and he is in London. He is still wearing his robes, which are much too thin for the weather, but he doesn’t mind because this can’t be anything except a dream. It’s raining—not heavily, but a slow drizzle that he knows will last for hours and will soak everything until there isn’t a piece of anything or anywhere that stays dry.
The rain is cold. From Azkaban, the cold is not new, but the damp is a forgotten feeling. He stands, savouring the rain for the minute, the wet trickle down his face, into his beard and down his back. It feels nice, nicer than he remembers the rain feeling, or maybe it’s the freedom. It feels real, blessedly, blessedly real.
Everything around him feels real, too real to be a dream, and he reflects that, if this is madness, it feels so much better than he thought it would. He leans out to brush his hand against the shop window beside him. It is slick and shiny, the rain pearling on the glass, and he catches sight of himself in the grimy windowpane and winces—his hair is too long, his cheeks a little more sunken than they ought to be, and he needs a shave. He sighs, running one hand through his hair and putting it into slightly better shape, but there’s little he can do about the rest.
He might be mad, but he would rather not walk around in London looking the way he does. He always liked being well-groomed, always liked the way that people looked at him when he was, and it’s his delusion so he sees no reason why he shouldn’t continue to be exactly that.
He stops in a shadowed alley to shift, and it’s only with a very mild sense of surprise that he finds that he can’t. He frowns, tries it again, but his form remains very solidly that of a man. A third attempt, with no result, and he shakes the water out of his thick hair. He is mad, but he’ll need to test the limits of this madness later. It is too cold, his robes already soaking, and he has the uncomfortable sense that he is standing out too much.
That should concern him less than it does, but for the moment he chalks it up to the madness. Maybe, having been taught to be careful in the Muggle world for so long, the feeling had followed him into his delusions. That is possible, or maybe he just misses the clothes he once had had for the Muggle world. T-shirts, jeans, leather jackets—Lily had once called him the consummate bad boy, and he had just smirked at her and said that all girls liked a bad boy. She had rolled her eyes at him, and James had draped an arm around her shoulders, and then they had stared at each other with such soppy expressions that Sirius had mimed throwing up to hide his own sense of jealousy.
He shakes the thought away, slipping out from the alley and walking up the street. He doesn’t know where he is, and he doesn’t think it really matters. There are more lights ahead, the moving white-yellow splotches that might be cars intermingled with the glare of neon reds and blues. A main thoroughfare. He can at least find an awning or something to shelter under while he thinks of what next to do, so he walks in that direction.
There’s an all-night diner on the corner. The windowpanes are foggy, telling him that the inside will be warm and humid, and he catches the scent of coffee in the air.
He hasn’t had coffee in weeks. Months, maybe. Not since—before.
He hesitates, but it is cold and rainy, and it’s his delusion so surely, he can go inside. He always liked coffee, and even if this is all in his head, it would be nice to have the bitter, rich flavour on his tongue again.
Hot air blasts against his face, and the bell above the door chimes as he walks in. The tiny diner hardly needs the bell—Sirius can see the entirety of the small space from the doorway. To his right, there is a line of booths, their seats cracked pleather peeling off in chunks; to his left, a long counter marches the length of the diner, stacked with black, blocky machines, plastic containers with baked goods, and a till. After the cold of the outside, the warmth of the shop is burning, and he can feel his fingers tingling. The air smells of coffee and memories.
“Miserable out, isn’t it?” A warm, familiar voice says, and Sirius looks behind the counter to see a tall, green-eyed redhead. If he wasn’t hallucinating, he would be taken aback, but instead all he can think is—of course she’s here, I’m mad. Why wouldn’t Lily be here? “Did you forget your brolly? Nice cosplay, by the way. Let me guess, Sirius Black. Azkaban robes?”
Sirius blinks. “Err—yes,” he says, not entirely sure what the last half of that sentence was about but figuring that this delusion is, at least, better than his reality and deciding in an instant that he’s going to suspend all disbelief and make this reality last as long as he can. He doesn’t want to go back. He might be mad, but in madness there is peace. “Thanks.”
“Best cosplay I’ve seen all day, and I’ve seen at least eight people try Sirius Black. You’re the only one who managed the hair, though—absolute bang-up job,” Lily says, bustling around behind the counter. Her nametag, a tiny silver pin on her left breast, even reads Lily. “The curls must be natural, right? Otherwise they’d have gone in this downpour. Have a seat, I’ll bring you a coffee. Where are all of your things?”
“My things?” Sirius sidles over to the closest booth, folding himself to slide into the seat, and Lily comes over and plonks a plain, white mug in front of him. She has a round pot of coffee on her other hand, and she pours the wonderful, steaming black liquid into his mug without spilling a drop.
“Yes, you know,” she replies, tilting her head a bit. “All the convention-goers always come back with a million things. Art, plush toys, keychains, bookmarks, I’ve seen it all. A lot of art—a lot of pornographic art, too. Then there are the people who want to take pictures…” She rolls her eyes.
“Pictures?”
“It’s Lily Evans, in person,” she says with a slight bow, and then she laughs, her messy bun bouncing at the back of her head. “As if there aren’t a thousand redheaded Lily Evans in Britain. I should charge, but I don’t. At least I’m not named Harry Potter—can you imagine how bad that would be in the schoolyard, these days?”
Sirius smiles back. He has no idea what she’s talking about, but it’s Lily, and she’s alive and smiling. She could say anything in the world, and he would listen. “Do you want to know a name even worse for the schoolyard?”
“What?”
“Sirius Black.”
She laughs again, a bright peal of sound in a rainy, foggy night. “No! Really? I don’t believe you! Show me your ID!”
Sirius doesn’t have pockets in these robes—they’re not exactly considered necessary, for Azkaban prisoners, and the Ministry deems it better that they don’t have any ability to conceal anything. Still, he moves as if reaching for one, hoping against hope that, since it is his delusion, he really will have a pocket, with his wallet, his identification, and preferably a fair amount of change.
He doesn’t.
His smile slips a bit. “Er—”
Lily’s smile disappears, replaced by a look of concern. “What is it?”
“I—” Sirius reaches up, awkwardly pushing his hair off his face. “I don’t—I seem to be missing my wallet. And my identification. And, er—everything else.”
She frowns, uncertain, but her reaction is more concern than it is fear. She looks around the small diner, but the few other guests seem to be preoccupied with each other and their own coffees, and she slides into the booth across from Sirius. Her jeans brush against his robes, and Sirius is suddenly very self-conscious of the way he is dressed. “Okay,” she says, and then she repeats herself. “Okay. Er—well, can you tell me what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Sirius admits, and it’s very much true. “I think I’ve—”
He cuts himself off. Even if he is mad, even if he’s gone completely around the bend, he doesn’t want to admit it to her. She’s Lily, made real, and admitting to madness is never an easy thing to do. The Blacks have a history of it—his own mother was a complete nutter—but that was something he had shared only with James and Remus. Not Lily, and he doesn’t want to tell Lily even in his hallucinations that he’s mad, that he’s in Azkaban, that this isn’t real.
He wants it to be real. The diner smells of coffee and baked goods, and it’s so warm.
“I think I’m dreaming,” he corrects himself, touching one hand to his head with a slight frown.
“I can tell you right now that you’re not,” Lily says, but then again, he has gone mad. “Were you, I don’t know, mugged? I mean, you don’t have any bags or anything either, and all the convention people always have a million bags with them. You don’t have your wallet and ID…”
Sirius shrugs helplessly, unsure of what to say. Her musing is breaking his immersion, and he thinks he can see the world cracking like an egg around him, the cold of Azkaban seeping through his thin robes. He fights it, staring at the plain walls yellowed with old smoke-stains, at the plain counter display holding stale muffins, slices of banana bread, and cookies.
He doesn’t want to leave just yet. He doesn’t want to wake up from his delusion to see his cell, to confront the reality that James is dead, and Lily is dead, and he is in prison. He wants to stay here, warm in this diner, a hot mug of coffee in front of him and a living, breathing Lily across from him. He wants to stay here, to soak in her presence, for whatever few minutes he can.
“I—I don’t remember, but that would make sense,” he agrees instead, and the world steadies around him. “I don’t know.”
“Should I call the Met?” Lily gnaws on her lower lip, unsure. “Or, I don’t know. It sounds like you’ve hit your head. We’re not that far from St. Bart’s… I’m closing in half an hour, so if you want to wait a bit, I can take you there, get you checked out?”
Sirius winces. “I don’t think that’s really necessary,” he murmurs, looking down at his cup of coffee. “What would I say? I look like a madman, dressed the way I am, and I don’t have any identification or anything. If I could just stay here for a bit—”
“The next half hour, sure, but after that…” Lily hesitates, her face uncertain, and they fall into awkward silence.
There’s a tinny noise, a little ditty that Sirius can’t place. It sounds like the ring of a telephone, but it’s much softer, less of a klaxon-blast, and it’s coming from her. She frowns, reaching for her jean pockets and pulls out a small, black box. It fits easily in her hand, and the tiny screen is white, black letters and numbers dancing over it in time to the way that it vibrates in her hand and sings. Dangling from the device is a mess: a tiny cat charm, a few beads, a jingling hexagonal box patterned in blue and gold thread.
“I’m sorry,” Lily says, looking up at him with a grimace from the thing in her hands. “I have to take this, do you mind?”
“Er—not at all,” Sirius replies, still looking at the strange device. He doesn’t know what it is, and he has a creeping sensation coming up his spine.
Sirius is many things. He is charming, and he is handsome. He’s brave, he’s defiant, and he is endlessly loyal, faithful, and protective of those that he cares for—Lily and James among them. He is intelligent, particularly gifted in Transfiguration and Defence Against the Dark Arts, though he rarely likes to brag about it to others. He would much rather be seen as the flippant and fun bad boy than smart. But there are things that he is not, and imaginative is not one of them.
Or, more accurately, he has the same sort of imagination that most people do. He dreams—he had imagined this delusion, hadn’t he? But there is a particular kind of imagination needed to create something entirely new, something so obviously technological. He knows full well that his surface-level understanding of the Muggle world is not enough for him to dream up the device that Lily holds in her hands. He doesn’t recognize it, doesn’t have a name for it, and yet Lily raises it to her ear and he suddenly realizes that that device, that tiny black box with the tiny light-up screen, is a telephone.
He looks around the diner once more. Much of it looks like the Muggle world that he knows, but it occurs to him that he doesn’t know what the large black appliances on the counter are, either. In the corner, the television has a shape that he’s never seen before—it’s flat, seemingly much less dangerous hanging above their heads than the clunky, boxy televisions that he would recognize. Outside the window, he sees cars, but they aren’t the models that he’s familiar with—these ones are smaller, sleeker in style. Sirius likes cars—he had a motorbike of his own before Azkaban—but he doesn’t know these models. They look like nothing he’s ever seen before.
Either his mind has become much more inventive while he was in Azkaban, or he is somewhere… real. And that thought is discombobulating, frightening, and…
Gratifying.
“Okay,” Lily is saying into the little black box, biting at her lower lip in worry. “Just—breathe, Marlene. Are you okay? Was anything taken? Did you call the Met?”
There’s a pause, and Sirius can hear high-pitched wailing from the tiny black box. His heartbeat picks up, a rush of adrenaline, because after years of war he recognizes that tone. It’s the sound of distress, a sound he knows well from being the first on the scene of too many Death Eater attacks.
The Dark Mark flying high, and knowing what they’d find inside—
“They wouldn’t come?” Lily’s voice pitches up a notch, and she looks around the diner. “No, okay. I’m coming home, I’ll close up early, we don’t have that many guests right now. Just—I don’t know, don’t touch anything I guess, I don’t know. I’m coming home, see you soon.”
“What is it?” Sirius hears himself asking, the slight note of worry in his voice hiding the more intense fear that he feels. This sense of panic is too familiar to him, but he’s in a delusion—it has to be a leftover from the war. There’s no other explanation.
“My flat was broken into,” Lily says, her face pale, her eyes wide as she turns off the device with a beep. “I need to go home. I can’t take you to St. Bart’s, and I have to finish up and close the diner, so—I hate to rush you, but do you mind?”
“No, I—” Sirius starts, and then he cuts himself off with a deep breath. “Do you need help? I can’t pay you for the coffee, but I have—I have a bit of experience with this sort of thing, and I don’t have anywhere to be, so it would be no trouble. I can at least walk you home.”
“I could hardly—” Lily breaks off her words with a slight, panicked laugh. “We don’t even know each other—I mean, I don’t even know your name, unless it really is Sirius Black.”
“But you still gave me coffee, and you sat to talk with me,” Sirius replies, trying his most charming smile. “Even when I look like—” He gestures down to himself.
“A lost, mugged, convention attendee?” Lily laughs again, this one a little more relaxed. “Well, I mean—I shouldn’t.”
“I’d feel better about the free coffee if you did,” Sirius says, raising the mug as he speaks. He’s mad. He probably even went mad on schedule, most don’t last long in Azkaban, but if this is madness it feels so much better than his reality. He also really doesn’t have anywhere else to go, so following Lily home seems as good an option as any.
Better than good, if he wants to be honest with himself. This is Lily—it’s a Lily he recognizes, in some strange, instinctual way. This is Lily, in a different context.
She hesitates.
“You don’t have anyone else at your flat to help, right?” Sirius adds, seeing her moment of weakness. “Just Marlene? It’s always good to go with backup. Just in case.”
“Yeah…” Lily bites her lip again, thinking, then she shoots him a puzzled look. “I don’t know why, but I feel like I know you, though I could swear we’ve never met before. I feel—nevermind, it’s silly. You’re not going to be creepy about this, are you? This doesn’t mean anything, you know. You offered, and I don’t owe you anything for this, all right?”
“Right.” Sirius nods, shooting her his most charismatic, lopsided grin, the one that he knows that girls can’t refuse. “Ignore the prison clothes and the scruff, I will not be creepy, and you don’t owe me anything. Really, if anything, I owe you.” He lifts the mug of coffee in salute.
“It’s just coffee.” Lily shakes her head, but she’s smiling again. “If you’re going to do this, could you at least tell me your name?”
“You’ll never believe this,” Sirius says, “but it really is Sirius Black.”
Their flat is a disaster, but whatever happened, happened long before even Marlene got home from work. They’re missing a television, two laptops, and something that they call a “DVD player” that Sirius doesn’t recognize. Of more concern to him is that the locks to their flat are broken, and after a very long negotiation in which Lily tells him that he’s only there because the doors don’t lock anymore and that both she and Marlene are putting their dressers against their bedroom doors, Sirius ends up staying the night as some sort of protection for them.
Sirius Black wakes up the next day in Lily’s flat. And the next, and the day after that, because they can’t seem to get a locksmith in for a week unless they’re willing to pay for a rush job and neither Lily nor Marlene have the money. The day after that, he concludes that while he has gone mad, his delusion seems to be exceptionally stable and it looks like he is here for the time being. And that is not a bad thing—even if this new world is often confusing, often terrifying, it’s also…
Peaceful.
This isn’t Azkaban. There are no Dementors pacing outside his cell, no icy wind perpetually blowing in from the North Sea. He wears warm clothes here, an ex-boyfriend’s leftover t-shirt, jumper and jeans that either Marlene or Lily never returned, and the small flat they share tends to be heated too much rather than too little. The size of the flat is made even smaller by the mismatched furniture obviously handed down from their relatives, bookshelves creaking under the weight of their books, and the wine cooler that the girls insist is an absolute necessity, and which is thankfully too large for the thieves to steal.
There is no Voldemort, in this world—not a real Voldemort, anyway, because it turns out that Harry Potter and the convention that Lily talked about relates to a series of explosively popular children’s novels. They’re quick, if completely disorienting, reads, which Sirius consumes over three days.
He doesn’t know what to make of them. Sure enough, it’s the wizarding world, plastered through hundreds of pages. Sirius sees and recognizes the backstory—he even remembers little Harry, his godson, the one that he didn’t even think to look for before he tore off on a revenge mission. In the books, James is dead, and Lily is dead, and by book three, it’s revealed that Sirius himself has been in Azkaban since. Book three is when Harry finds Pettigrew, when Sirius himself almost manages to get his revenge, but he doesn’t. He is bitterly disappointed that he doesn’t.
It’s the world that he knows, splayed out in a story, and Sirius recognizes the backdrop even if he doesn’t know the story. The books give him more questions than answers—is this his world? Is his world hidden between the cracks of this one, or is this just a strange formulation of his madness? Can this be the future as told by someone else of his world?
And if so, what about him? What about his fate? He escapes, when Harry is thirteen years old, and he lives on the run for nearly two years before tragically dying at the end of book five. What does that mean?
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know so many things, and the books are only the half of it. He has figured out, from the newspaper, that the date is March 22, 2008, and there are a thousand things in the Muggle world that he doesn’t recognize. He doesn’t know how to use a computer. He doesn’t have an email address. He doesn’t have one of those ubiquitous cell phones, which have largely gone and replaced the line-locked telephones that he is used to. Mad or not, it appears that he’s skipped ahead some twenty-five years, since it was 1982 when he last paid attention.
Can this really be a delusion? Sirius is not that imaginative, and this world, with its portable computers and flatscreen televisions and strange appliances, is too complex for him to hallucinate.
There is no magic in this world. Sirius tries, more times than he can count, to shift into his Animagus form. He’s never successful, and indeed the effort just makes him look constipated. He never feels even a hint of magic, not the tingling heat in his fingers or the running spark in his body. He has no wand, but the few runes he knows don’t work either. Magic doesn’t work, and Sirius, surprisingly, finds that less distressing than he thinks he should.
James doesn’t exist in this world. Or rather—Sirius pokes at Lily’s new laptop one day, left open on her Facebook, and searches at the top bar as he’s seen her do for “James Potter”. Computers are surprisingly easy to figure out, with observation and common sense, and it takes only a few minutes for him to discover that there are something on the order of a thousand James Potters in the Greater London Area, and another fifteen thousand throughout all of Britain. A hundred or so, Sirius would have considered stalking them to see if his James existed in this world, but a thousand was a little much.
He doesn’t think that James would exist, anyway. There are no Sirius Blacks listed in Facebook, or at least none that he can recognizably see as himself, and the same holds true for Remus Lupin. Maybe, in this world, he doesn’t exist—he and James and anyone else who is a pureblood or a halfblood. There is no magic, so why would they exist? But Lily is, or she was, a Muggleborn, and she would have existed even without magic.
He doesn’t know. He isn’t sure he wants to know—he worries, every night, that he will fall sleep and wake up in his cell. He always dreams about his cell, about the Dementors that pace outside his bars and the cold sea wind that blows in from his window, but he never wants to wake up there.
He always wants to wake up here, on the couch in the grubby, slightly run down, overly cluttered flat with its own wine cooler that Lily shares with Marlene. There is no James, and as far as he can tell there is no Remus and no Peter. But there is Lily, and there is a whole world here at relative peace.
In this world, Lily and her roommate Marlene, who is nothing like the Marlene McKinnon that Sirius knew from Hogwarts, are students at University College London. Lily is reading English literature, and Marlene nursing, and they’re in and out all the time with their classes, their part-time jobs, their clubs and societies and other activities. Marlene likes yoga; Lily kickboxes for sport. And in the middle, Sirius cooks, and he cleans, and he generally tries to keep out of their way because—well, he doesn’t have anywhere else to go for the moment, and he might as well be a good houseguest while he figures out how this new world works. Every night, they ask him if his memory has returned.
Every night, he says that it hasn’t, and he sleeplessly worries for hours before he falls asleep that he’ll wake up somewhere else. He doesn’t want to be anywhere else.
It takes him until the next week to decide that he needs to go out and find himself a job. He still isn’t entirely sure that this new world is real, but he can’t keep living off Lily and Marlene’s kindness, so he gets himself up off the sofa, wanders out, and find himself work at a garage in about two days. He’s good with his hands, and fortunately the basics of cars haven’t changed that much in the past twenty-five years, and after that it only takes him a week to move out to his own terrible bedsit, then three months to find himself his own flat. It isn’t much, but it’s his, and it’s not Azkaban.
No one is looking for him. That’s the oddest thing—he wonders sometimes, if not often, whether Lily is right. Maybe he was at the convention, cosplaying as Sirius Black, and maybe he did get mugged on his way home. Maybe he did just lose his memory, and maybe he is someone else and he just doesn’t remember. But no one is looking for him, and Sirius thinks that, if he was someone else, maybe it’s better that he doesn’t remember.
A few, terrifying months after that, Sirius takes steps to put himself legally in Great Britain—the magic-less Great Britain of 2008, that is. His manager at the garage, who he suspects has more than one shady connection, seems satisfied with Sirius’ flailing excuses about “needing a new start”, and a few months later, he has a driver’s licence, a passport, and a National Insurance number.
When he accepts them, it feels like something new, something solid. The Sirius Black that stares out from his new driver’s licence and passport is young, only twenty-two years old, clean-shaven and with his hair half-tied out of his face. He doesn’t have any memory of the past, not the real past, and no trauma to trouble him.
When Sirius Black looks at his new identification, he sees a whole new future stretching ahead of him. A future, with warmth and hope and joy, and he is happy to forget.
This world, if it is a new world instead of merely a delusion, is better than his old one. He’s not in prison, even if he still dreams about it every night. Sirius might remember his old world, he might remember his old pain, but in this world he doesn’t hurt. In this world, he never made that critical mistake that sold his friends to the devil, because there is no magic in this world. There is no magic, and that means there is no Voldemort, and that means that it didn’t happen. None of that happened.
There is no James here. But there is Lily. Lily is here, and she is alive, breathing, and even happy.
Christmas in London is pitiful, Sirius thinks, a cigarette hanging from his lips as he stands on the sidewalk outside his flat. He isn’t smoking, just chewing on the butt end of the cigarette vaguely wishing that he were smoking. The first time that he had pulled out a pack in front of the girls, Marlene, showing more nerve than he had thought her capable, had knocked it out of his hand, shrieking, then run in to grab her laptop and showed him approximately seventeen images of diseased lungs before extracting a promise out of him to never, ever smoke.
So, he doesn’t smoke anymore. He isn’t a wizard anymore, if he ever was. Lung cancer might be a very real risk for him, and he supposes it’s better that he stopped before he ever really got started on the habit. His bank account isn’t unlimited, and an addiction would probably cost more than he could reasonably afford anyway.
After so many months, as strange as their first meeting was, he and Lily are friends. He’s not entirely sure how that happened—one minute, it seems like he is imposing on her and her flatmate on her sofa, and the next thing he knows he has his own flat, his own job, and his own life. He has a motorbike, stored at the garage, and his own phone. He’s got mates now, from work and that he’s met at the pub, and while none of them are James or Remus, he still likes drinking and watching the game with them.
But he always wanders over to the diner where Lily works for coffee and breakfast or dinner if he knows she’s on shift. He hangs out at their warm, tiny, cozy flat at least twice a week, helping them with dinner and watching whatever is on their telly with them. He becomes versed in Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Merlin, the last of which he can’t help but find hopelessly hilarious for reasons that he can’t explain. How does one explain, without being dragged to an asylum, that they don’t remember anything about their lives before March? How does he explain that aside from carrying the name of Sirius Black, he also carries all the memories of a fictional character?
What the hell had happened to him? As far as he can tell, Lily’s explanation, that he had been mugged and lost his memories, was perfectly fine. The Harry Potter books even exist—is it not possible that he was at a Harry Potter convention, that he had been roleplaying as Sirius Black, and then after the attack he had simply assumed that persona?
It seems almost plausible, but the theory bothers him. To begin, aside from the fact that Sirius Black is a piss-poor character to play, his memories are too comprehensive. The Harry Potter books don’t mention his history as anything more than a backdrop, so if he is mad, if his conviction that he is Sirius Black is just a delusion, why does he remember specific details and events that aren’t discussed anywhere? He remembers trapping a seventh-floor corridor with a swarm of pixies; he remembers charming the sixth-floor windows into spitting lemonade at everyone who walks by. Even his brief foray into Harry Potter fanfiction of the Marauders era doesn’t account for the completeness of his memories.
Second, he still dreams of Azkaban every night. Every night, without fail, he is back in his featureless, stone cell, with only the Dementors outside for company. Every night, he shivers with cold, no matter how many blankets he piles on himself beforehand, and he smells the salt air that blows in endlessly from the North Sea. Every night, he hears the cries of his fellow prisoners—some of them beg, but not very many of them, and not for long.
Never for very long. They all go silent, in the end.
The dreams are a horrid reminder, though his fears of waking up there have faded with time. For more than nine months, Sirius has woken up in this world: either in his flat or on Lily’s sofa. Magicless, but young, and without the past that troubles him.
Finally, there is Lily. How does he explain Lily? He never met Lily Evans before the night at the diner, or so Lily says, so how does he know Lily quite as well as he does? She doesn’t have magic in this world, and she didn’t go to Hogwarts, but she is still the same fundamental person that Sirius remembers from the wizarding world. She’s still bright, still shining, still fierce and passionate and brave, and she’s still kind. For god’s sake, the woman had sat across from him while he had been dressed in prison robes without a penny in his pocket, poured him coffee, and helped him through his first, stumbling week in a new world.
His first, stumbling week after losing all his memories, he corrects himself firmly. His memories can’t be real.
There’s just here, and there’s now. He takes out his phone and glances at the text messages there.
- Christmas fights are the best.
- Coming over.
- Just need to buy whiskey.
- I need whiskey.
There’s no snow in Christmas in London. For that, they need to head further north, but at least it isn’t raining. Christmas in London is miserable, but Sirius can’t be unhappy because Lily is coming back. A train on Christmas day must have been hell to find, let alone an open liquor store, so he sends back a single message.
DW about the whiskey. I have some.
James doesn’t exist, he reminds himself sharply while gnawing on his cigarette. Not here. There is no James, and while Lily is obviously popular with the blokes, there hasn’t been anyone steady the entire time he’s known her. It can hardly be a betrayal when Lily’s never met a James Potter in her life, can it? Or, well, he’s never specifically asked if she knows a James Potter, but she has 962 friends on Facebook and none of them are named James Potter.
At least in one respect, being in this new world is harder than being in the wizarding world. In the wizarding world, his feelings for Lily Evans had never gone anywhere—they were there, in the background, acknowledged by him personally and secreted away never to be acted upon. In the wizarding world, there was James, and James always came first.
In this new world, well…
They talk. They text almost more than they talk—short notes, long rants, and everything in between, small notes dropped throughout the day and long conversations at night. She knows that he hasn’t gotten his memory back, but that he doesn’t care overly much about it, and in time she’s stopped asking because he so obviously doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s moved on, he is moving on, and this is a different world. This is a new world, and James doesn’t exist here.
His phone beeps, and he pulls it out and reads a single message.
- On the train. You better have ice.
He laughs, and the sound is more carefree than he remembers.
She shows up at his flat at about eleven that night, her green eyes flashing with anger and her red hair wild around her face. He lets her in, watches as she drops her bag on the floor and tosses herself on the ratty couch that Sirius bought for a fifty quid from someone on Kijiji.
“I hate my family,” she announces, looking up at him. “You promised me whiskey.”
He hands her a glass, already filled with ice, and pours her a glass of the St. George’s he picked up the week before to try. It’s a new-ish distillery, a bit cheaper than the other brands on offer, but he doesn’t care. Whiskey is whiskey, and as a bonus, it tastes more like Firewhiskey than anything else he’s found thus far.
“So?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. “Do you want to talk about it, or do you just want to drink?”
“My sister is such a bitch,” Lily spits, downing her glass of whiskey. “She’s a nightmare—so what, she studied accounting? So what, she has a decent job as a bookkeeper? She brought her new beau home for Christmas, and a more supercilious, condescending asshole—”
She grabs for the bottle that Sirius has left on the coffee table, pouring herself a second glass. “His name is Dudley Vernon, and he’s five years older than her, and he has a job as an executive. I asked, an executive of what?”
“And?” Sirius raises an eyebrow, a smile spreading across his face.
“A marketing and advertising agency, I think,” Lily replies, waving a hand dismissively. “And it’s not so much what he does, so much as his attitude—thinks of himself as being very important, he does. Christmas dinner was all about him, all about the importance of his job and how successful he was, and then he looks at me and asks what I’m doing.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t go well.”
“You can say that again.” Lily snorts. “I said I was reading English literature at UCL, and then he starts talking about the uselessness of the humanities.”
Sirius winces. He doesn’t know a lot about the world he’s found himself in, but he knows enough to know that Lily’s program of study is not highly regarded. She loves it—she loves reading, she loves analysing books for their themes and drawing out conclusions about the author’s beliefs, or how an author was criticizing society or forewarning the generations for the future. Sirius doesn’t have a comparator, but he thinks it’s important, or maybe he just likes hearing Lily talk about something she’s so passionate about. She’s especially vocal about women’s writing at the end of the eighteenth century and the tracing of early modern feminism. Sirius can’t always follow her discussions on this point, but he always listens anyway.
“Anyway, I told him off. I asked him how we can know ourselves as people, how we can interrogate our own humanity other than through the humanities, and he told me, in the most condescending voice you can imagine,” she draws in a breath, scrunching up her nose, “You can’t eat books. Then he tells my parents they shouldn’t be funding my education, and my parents are very nonconfrontational, you know, so they try to laugh it off. I point out that I have a part-time job and everything, and he has the gall to tell me that waitressing is all I’m fit for, with an education in the humanities!”
She takes another swallow of whiskey, her face red. “So, then I ask Petunia if I can have a word, because she’s still sitting there like everything Vernon says is the word of God himself. We go off to the sitting room, and I point out that it might be nice if she stopped him from criticizing her family, because even if we don’t really get on we are sisters, and do you know what she says?”
“No?”
“She says that Vernon is right.” Lily stares into her glass, her eyes narrowing. “She says I really should consider switching into something practical, and then she drops the news that she and Vernon are getting married in the summer. I’m not invited to be a bridesmaid, by the way. I tell her that Vernon’s a prick, and that it’s way too soon—they’ve only been together about six months, and who does that?”
She shakes her head, raising the glass of whiskey to her lips again. “She was really offended, and then she started ripping into me. Telling me how successful he was, how well he did for himself, and basically outlining what a good husband he would be based on his success. So, I quote Austen at her.”
“Austen?”
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” Lily recites, and Sirius nods, even if he doesn’t follow. “But the rest of Pride and Prejudice really criticizes that. It was written in a time when women in the landed gentry really did have to marry well, or they’d have to resign themselves to lives of genteel poverty; Charlotte marries Mr. Collins, but she does it because she has no choice. We’re not in that world anymore, and Petunia has a good job of her own. She shouldn’t be looking at things like money when thinking about marrying.”
Sirius nods, and Lily sighs and continues.
“It was the wrong thing to say, which I knew it would be. Petunia and I, we’ve never really gotten on. Too different—she cares too much about what people say about her, about how other people see her. Not that we’ve ever really been poor, you know. Mum and Dad do well enough, though we’re solidly working-class. But I’m not really surprised that she wants to marry Vernon because of his career, she’d love to be able to break into the upper classes. Live in a mansion, send her kids to public school, all of it. What’s wrong with state schools? It did us fine, got both of us through our GCSEs and A-levels and into university, right?”
“Right,” Sirius offers, recognizing the terms for the secondary school examinations. He probably did some of those too, but for the life of him he can’t remember what he studied. He doesn’t think he was university-bound, though.
Lily sighs again. “She got angry with me. Yelled a lot of things that I don’t want to repeat—it basically came down to how I was selfish, how I didn’t understand how hard she had it, how I was going to be a burden on our family forever with my English degree and how I can’t even manage to hold onto a boyfriend for more than three months at a time. Not sure what the last has to do with anything, but I suppose marriage is a status symbol.”
“Is it?”
“I think so—every perfect romance ends in marriage, right?” Lily lets out a breathy little laugh, looking away from Sirius. “Well—that’s about it, I mean, I suppose it all sounds a bit silly from this angle.”
Sirius raises an eyebrow again. He’s never heard such a transparent statement in his life, and he can’t imagine the Lily he knows letting her sister have the last word. He pokes her in the side. “That’s not the end of it, Lil. I know you well enough.”
“Look, it just came out, all right?” Lily says, turning back to him, her face flushed. “It doesn’t mean anything, and it just came out, and I’ll just tell them we broke up the next time I see them. It’s nothing they don’t expect from me by now. No big deal, right?”
Sirius frowns, and it takes him a second to work through her words. She would just tell her family that they had broken up, which would be fine because she never had kept a boyfriend for more than three months, which means that she told them that…
Ah.
There is an awkward pause, and Sirius grabs the still-mostly-full glass of whiskey out of her hand and throws it back. It burns, hot and biting, on the way down, but it lights a fire in his stomach, and the harsh taste brings the whole world into perspective.
There is no James here. There was never a James here, and Sirius might be a bit mad, but he lives here.
“Don’t,” he chokes out. “Or—don’t, unless we actually do break up by the next time you see them.”
They don’t break up.
Three months pass, and Marlene is shocked.
Six months pass, and Marlene is ready to throw them an engagement party.
A year passes, and Marlene starts hinting that maybe it’s time for a ring, Sirius, really.
Two years pass, and Marlene stops hinting, drags them both into a meeting, and tells them outright that she is moving out, thank you, and that if they’ve made it this long they’re meant for each other so they should really just get hitched already, god.
And Sirius moves into the cozy two-bedroom flat that he spent the first week in his new life in.
It doesn’t feel like so much time has passed. It’s never one thing, or one magic moment. It’s the cold mornings walking Lily to the diner when she’s scheduled for opening shift, then hanging around for coffee and breakfast before he heads to the garage for work. It’s dinners at corner dives and kebab shops and food trucks, walks along the Thames, and weekends at the free street festivals that inevitably spread through London in the summer. It’s evenings in front of the television watching Doctor Who, lazy Saturday mornings reading the paper while Lily soaks herself in a new novel, and warm nights making love. He still dreams of Azkaban, but as the years pass, this just becomes a fact.
Sirius Black is a Muggle. He works at a garage, where, as one of the boss’ most reliable people, he’s now a supervisor and shift manager rather than just a mechanic. He learns how to balance the books, deal with rough customers, and run his own business. The only odd things about him are his name and the fact that he doesn’t remember anything about his life before March 2008—or rather, that his memories from before then don’t make any sense at all. A very small part of him is still wonders about that, but most of him is convinced that this is just a persistent delusion, a relic of a years-ago mugging and an undiagnosed brain injury. There really is no other possibility.
But his memories have magic, so he can never really be sure.
Lily finishes school, and she finds a job in human resources. It’s not her degree that gets her the job, so much as it is the combination of her degree and her experience at the diner that lands her the entry-level position, but Lily is good at people management. They both get promotions, and they both celebrate life’s tiny victories, and once in every long while they go out and get what they call a fancy dinner, though it’s really only the kind of dinner that Lily’s sister Petunia gets every Friday.
But they’re happy. Sirius meets the Evans, meets the Vernons, and he subtly finds ways to show that what they don’t have in material goods, they make up for in other ways. Petunia and her husband barely spend time together, caught up as they are in their professional lives, while Sirius and Lily are always laughing. It might be about something that happened in the Tube one day, or an act they saw at last week’s street festival, or even just a mistake made on their taxes, but there’s always a funny or silly or self-deprecating anecdote to share.
Not everything is perfect, of course; they argue, and they argue rather a lot. Sirius tends to hotheadedness, while Lily has a better control over her temper, the presence of her sister being a gaping exception to the usual rule. Lily is trusting, always ready to give people the benefit of the doubt, and even if Sirius knows well that he once benefitted from that same kindness, he tends toward mistrusting people himself. They balance each other out, their strengths compensating for the other’s weaknesses, and time passes.
It is March 18, 2012, exactly four years after Sirius met Lily, that he awkwardly sits and fiddles with the box in his pocket. The custom, he has heard, is that he’s supposed to buy something worth three months of his wages, but that seems like rather a lot, and Sirius and Lily really don’t have the money to spare for such an extravagance. Sirius buys a simple ring: a single, tiny diamond set in a gold band. He hopes it will be enough.
In the wizarding world, James gave Lily a Potter family heirloom as an engagement ring. Sirius remembers it well: a large ruby, nestled in a halo of sapphires. Lily had loved it.
But the Lily of this world is not the Lily of the wizarding world. There is no magic in this world, and no James, and there are a thousand little differences between his Lily and James’ Lily that he’s come to see over the past four years. In the big things, they’re the same—in the small things, they aren’t. His Lily reads more than the wizarding world’s Lily ever did, she gets hooked on stupid phone games like Plants vs. Zombies, and she watches a lot more television. It’s the little differences, he thinks, that sets his Lily apart from James’ Lily.
He has it all planned out. They’re going to the diner—Lily doesn’t work there anymore, but it’s been such a huge part of their lives. It was where they had first met, where they had spent so many mornings and evenings when she was in school, and even now it’s still a cheap breakfast or dinner when they can’t decide where else to go. The diner is important, and Sirius thinks it’s perfect for where this next step of their lives will take them.
“Er—” he clears his throat, as Lily is looking over the dessert options. He’s left it for the end, because he thinks that is the tradition—or, maybe, he just couldn’t work up the nerve earlier. “We met here four years ago, Lil, and while it hasn’t always been easy, it’s always been fun, and I—there’s no one else I’d rather spend the rest of my life with. Please, would you do me the honour of—”
He fishes for the box, but he can’t find it in his pockets anymore. He panics, searching, but it’s not even thirty seconds before Lily puts him out of his misery.
“I pickpocketed it off you earlier,” she grins, pulling it out of her bag and dropping it on the table. “Ring boxes, they have a particular look to them. I’m glad it was for me.”
Sirius doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry in relief, but she hasn’t actually given an answer yet. He stares at her, draws a deep breath to tell her that if she doesn’t like the ring, they can return it, and they can shop for a new one together—
“And yes, Sirius. Yes, I’ll marry you, and I love the ring.” She grins, a little impish, plucks it out of the box and slides it on her finger.
They aren’t Petunia and her husband, so there’s no grand wedding. Instead, it’s City Hall for them, and Marlene is there as a witness, and so is his friend Alan from the pub. They keep it simple—no huge reception, a home-baked cake, and a tiny party in their flat, and that is that.
Sirius Black is married. To Lily Evans Black.
The years pass—another one, then two, and they move to Bristol when Lily gets pregnant. London’s no place to raise a child, she says; it’s a wonderful place to live in their twenties, but she doesn’t want to raise their kid in a tiny flat in London. They should have more greenery around them, she says, and so they leave. Sirius opens his own garage, and Lily finds a job as the office manager for a mid-sized corporation in the city centre.
James Sirius Black is born on April 14, 2015, with a full head of dark hair and Lily’s green eyes. And when Sirius picks him up and holds him, he is smacked with other memories.
There was another child, in his past. Another baby with messy dark hair and Lily’s green eyes that he once held in his arms. That child, he remembers, was named Harry James Potter, and Sirius can’t help but remember a time when he maybe, just maybe, abandoned that child to go on a wild hunt for revenge.
He’s older now. The Sirius of this world, of 2015, is nearly thirty, and he feels the responsibility he rarely did when he was twenty-two. Most of the time, he takes for granted that his memories are a lie. There is no magic, and none of it makes any sense. And yet—
He still dreams of Azkaban.
This dream starts as it always does: Sirius is sitting in his cell, and it is silent but for the howling winds outside and the rattling breaths of the Dementors as they pace the hallways. Every now and then, but rarely, there is a cry, a sob, or a scream, but it never lasts very long. He thinks it’s the summer, now, because the air is cold but not frigid, and he’s come to know from long experience the bitter cold of Azkaban in the winter. He settles himself against the wall of his cell to wait until the inevitable end.
There’s a noise from outside his cell—the sound of someone speaking, an authoritative tone that has Sirius cautiously curious. He slips closer to the bars of his cell, peering down the grim corridor. None of the other prisoners seem to be aware of anything. He can just make out the huddled figure of Rodolphus Lestrange in the cell beside him, but the man is insensate.
“Yes, that will be fine,” the voice says, and Sirius turns. He doesn’t recognize the man, who wears a lime green bowler hat and dark red robes that look like a splash of blood against the greys and blacks of the wizarding prison. Whoever it is, though, is clearly important. From years working in a garage, Sirius knows self-importance when he sees it, and this man reeks of it. A Ministry official of some kind.
The man is walking down the hallway, glancing into each cell in apparent disinterest. There is no reason to be interested in any of them. Sirius is in one of the sections of Azkaban devoted to those with life sentences, and they should all be mad by now. The only reason that Sirius is not is that he hasn’t been here, not truly, in many years. Sirius doesn’t live here—he belongs somewhere else, so he only watches with a mild, distant sort of interest.
Then the man pulls even with him, looking in his cell, and Sirius sees it. The Daily Prophet.
The newspaper is rolled up in a bundle and hanging out of the man’s robes. Sirius doesn’t need to see the title, because he can recognize the typeface well enough to see it. There’s a dark blotch running along one side, a black-and-white image, and a chilly shiver runs over his shoulders. It’s a family, or not quite a family—he can see only a few faces.
He knows this family. He knows what’s supposed to happen here, and without thinking he knows the year is 1993, and that these are the Weasleys. He knows before without asking that this paper will show him Peter, and he knows that this paper will lead him to escape Azkaban and continue his hunt for revenge. He knows that he’ll meet Harry, his godson, if he follows this path, and he knows that Harry relies heavily on him for guidance through the Triwizard Tournament and through the first year of Voldemort’s inevitable return.
He wants to wake up. He doesn’t want to follow this path.
But he draws forward. “That paper,” he hears himself saying, his voice gravellier and rougher than it should be. “Are you done with that paper?”
The man—Minister Fudge, Sirius remembers—blinks. “My… paper?”
Sirius gestures to the Daily Prophet. “There isn’t much to do here, and I’d appreciate it if you’re done. Missed doing the crossword.”
“Err—yes, I suppose,” Fudge says, throwing him a puzzled look, but he hands the paper over. Sirius smiles in thanks, and his face feels wrong, stiff, like he hasn’t moved his face like this in far too long. Fudge studies him for a single, curious moment, then he walks away.
Sirius looks down at the paper. It is, just as in the books, an announcement that the Weasley family has won the annual Daily Prophet grand prize draw, and that they are spending their winnings on a family holiday to Egypt. On the front page, there is Peter, a small rat on a boy’s shoulder, and he knows that boy is named Ronald Weasley and that he is Harry Potter’s best friend.
He knows that Voldemort is still alive, and he knows that Peter is right there at Hogwarts, ready to hand Harry to Voldemort the second that he hears that Voldemort is returning. In dream, he crumples the paper in his hands, and he stalks to his tiny, narrow, sea-facing window to stare outside.
When he wakes up, he tries to forget about it. It’s only a dream—an oddity of a long-ago mugging. It’s not real, and he dismisses it. Sirius has always dreamt of Azkaban, ever since the division he set between the memories that are real and the memories that he has long since questioned. It’s only that, until recently, these dreams are only an uncomfortable part of him, an endless series of dull, grey stone walls and frigid ice-chill. The dreams have never given him problems, only served as a reminder of his questionably real past, something he has long since learned to tolerate and ignore.
That works for a night. Maybe two nights, or three.
But the dreams last longer. They’re more real, in a way that he can’t describe. The winds are colder on his skin, and he wakes with goosebumps. He can still smell the sea salt brine in his nostrils when he wakes, and the chill of the Dementors leave their effect for hours. He’s struggling to wake, struggling to come home to the world that he loves, and it’s wrong.
Everything is wrong.
There have always been questions about his past. His memories are too complete to be fully imagined—he can remember details from Hogwarts, about his friends, about Dumbledore and McGonagall and Flitwick that no one else can. He remembers everything so completely that sometimes, when he’s reading the Harry Potter books to his own little Jamie, he stops and thinks, no, that’s wrong. It wasn’t like that.
And no one has come looking for him. People always leave an impact, whether good or ill, and no one has ever reported him missing from their lives. Sirius simply showed up here, in this world, with no history.
The thoughts haunt him, and the dreams pull at him.
What if the wizarding world existed? What if Sirius Black was from there, what if everything he remembers is very much real? What if the paper, the visit from Fudge, the break in the monotony of his dreams is the signal for him to go back?
Sirius becomes more withdrawn, quieter, and he spends more time with Jamie than he normally does. Jamie is walking now, and talking, and he looks quite a lot like the Harry in Sirius’ memories. Harry had been that age. Harry had been talking, even flying on the tiny toy broomstick that Sirius had bought him, when James and Lily had—
He doesn’t finish the thought.
He stops sleeping. He takes a coffee after dinner at night, trying to fight off sleep and the dreams that inevitably come, but that isn’t a lasting solution. In the wizarding world, there was Wideye Potion, and that would have sustained him for a few weeks as it did when he worked for the Order of the Phoenix—
No.
The coffee doesn’t work anyway. He has night terrors, now—he sleeps lightly, rousing himself sharply if he thinks there’s a chance that he won’t wake up in this beautiful, beautiful world, because he won’t leave. He won’t go back. It wasn’t real. None of it as real, so there’s nothing for him to go back to.
Sirius is just mad, and that’s all.
“You have to talk about it.” Lily finally says, her voice sharp even through her tiredness when, a week later, Sirius has startled her awake for the third time in a night. “You haven’t been yourself, recently. You’re not sleeping, and I can’t tell if you want to sleep or not, and this is getting absolutely ridiculous. What's wrong?”
Sirius sighs, leaning over to pull his wife into his arms. “I don’t know, Lil.”
“Don’t you?” She kisses him lightly on his neck, and the motion softens the harshness of her words. “You’ve been like this for days, and you’re not stupid.”
“Maybe you just wouldn’t believe me if I did.” Sirius smiles, but there’s a slight edge in his voice, a hint of worry that Lily picks up on immediately. She rolls off to look at him, concern in her bright green eyes.
“Try me,” she says.
He hesitates, looking away, but she pulls one of his hands into hers. They’re such a contrast; Sirius’ hands are rough from working with them all day, while Lily’s are pale and soft. “I know you have secrets, Sirius.”
He sighs again, reaching to pull her into his arms. “You remember the night we met?”
“How could I forget?” A small smile dances on her lips. “You were dressed in robes, staggering in from the rain. No identification, no wallet, nothing.”
“Nothing but my memories,” Sirius replies, and he knows that’s different from what he’s always said. He’s always simply said that he doesn’t remember, he doesn’t know—he only knew his name, and that was all. He can feel her go quiet in his arms.
“Sirius…” she says, pulling away with a low sound of warning in her voice. “You always said—”
“Because my memories don’t make any sense, Lil.” Sirius shakes his head. “Because my name is Sirius Black, and my memories are of Sirius Black. I remember Hogwarts. I remember my parents, and book five underplays my mother, honestly. She was usually much more virulent in her hate, and far worse in person than her painting suggests. I remember fighting in the First Wizarding War—I remember James. I remember Remus, details about Remus that never come up in the Harry Potter books. I remember magic. And at night, I dream about being in Azkaban.”
There’s a long, slow pause. “That doesn’t make any sense, Sirius.”
“I know.” Sirius laughs, and it’s a sharp, hurt sound, nothing like a laugh. “It doesn’t make any sense at all, but you know—no one did come looking for me. Even if I’d just been mugged and lost my memories, wouldn’t someone have come looking for me? A family member, a work colleague, a friend… but I just appeared out of nowhere.”
“Marlene and I checked with the Met.” Lily’s words are quiet. “That first week. We were worried. But there were no missing persons matching your description, so we left a report that we’d found you with our break-in report and our contact info. We never heard anything further.”
“That’s comforting.” Sirius squeezes her hand, just to say without words that whatever he says, it doesn’t change how he feels. He loves her—whatever world he is in, it seems, he loves Lily Evans. “Very comforting, Lil.”
“It’s sad, is what it is,” Lily replies coolly, and she looks up at him. “But why are you thinking about this now? What happened? Why now?”
Sirius is silent for a moment. “I saw Cornelius Fudge in my dreams, a week ago. He gave me a paper. The paper that has Peter Pettigrew on it. The one that sparks my escape from Azkaban, the one that leads me to Harry. And then, for the next two years…”
“And?” Lily is sitting up, watching him with an expression of concern. “You’ve been reading the books to Jamie, too. Your mind is just mulling over it—there’s no magic. The books have meaning, but they aren’t real. It’s nothing for you to stop sleeping over, Sirius.”
“Maybe I’m mad,” Sirius replies, looking away, voicing the terrifying thought. “What if—and just hear me out, Lil—what if they are real, and what if I need to go back? I still dream about Azkaban, so if it’s real, then I’m connected to it—”
“That is literally impossible,” Lily says flatly, and Sirius finds her calm, unimpressed demeanour more comforting than anything else. “There is no magic, Sirius, and you’re a fool for letting this worry you so much. You never wanted to talk about your past, so I never thought it was important, but if it’s causing you this much distress, we’ll fix it. I’ll book you an appointment with the doctor tomorrow, and we’ll go from there, all right?”
“I—” Sirius wants so badly to believe her words. It can’t be that simple, can it? “Are you sure—”
“Yes, Sirius,” Lily says, and her voice is full of the conviction that Sirius wishes he had. “We’ll deal with it in the morning, so let’s sleep, for god’s sake.”
“All right,” Sirius concedes with a slow, uncertain sigh.
She pauses, then she leans over and wraps her arm around him, tugging him down to lie beside her. “Everything will look much better in the morning,” she promises. “Good night, Sirius. I love you, even if you’re absolutely mad.”
Sirius laughs very slightly, burying his head into her red curls, feeling something like relief spread through him with her gentle gibe. They’ll deal with it in the morning, he hears, and that’s all. He might be mad, but she loves him, and magic wasn’t real. “I love you too, Lil.”
One night. It’s just one night, and the next day, he’ll go find some answers to his past.
When he wakes up, he’s in Azkaban, and he’s holding a crumpled newspaper in his hands.
It is two years. Just under two years, and Sirius Black is falling through the Veil.
He did it. He did all the things that he was supposed to do, in the hope that he would go home. He escaped from Azkaban, right on schedule, using the exact bloody method that his character used in the books, and then he stalked Harry and hunted down Peter and he did everything, every bloody thing the exact way he was supposed to. He wrote the permission slip to Hogsmeade for Harry, he provided guidance and love and care to his godson for the next two years, and then he chased Harry down to the Ministry of Magic and fell through the Veil duelling Bellatrix Lestrange. He’s done everything he was supposed to, and Harry will live in this ending, and so will his two best friends, and so will most of the Weasleys, Harry’s surrogate and soon-to-be actual family. There might be better endings, but in all the circumstances, Harry’s ending on that path is a very good one. Voldemort is defeated in that ending.
He did everything the exact way he was supposed to, and he’s done in this world. But he can’t die here. He can’t die now, because there is the other world, and that is where he lives.
He doesn’t know how the magic works. He never has, really, but he is falling, and he shuts his eyes and he pleads with whatever it is to take him home. Home, to Bristol, to his tiny house with the stupid mortgage and his job and the bills and taxes and whatever other incredibly banal and adult things that need to get done. Home, with his Lily and his Jamie, where magic doesn’t exist, but where he has so much else.
Just once more, he insists, forcing himself to imagine his house, with his wife and son. That’s where he wants to be, that’s where he needs to be, and that is home.
He lands hard, his feet coming out from under him. It’s dark, wherever he is, and he jerks upright, trying to hurry his eyes into adjusting for the light. He whips around, reaching for his wand—
It isn’t there. Instead, all he can hear is the blessed sound of Jamie’s voice shrieking for his mother.