A Black Hound at Death's Right Hand

by Lomonaaeren

Summary:

Harry knew from the time he was very young that the Dursleys was wrong about magic not being real, because of the ghostly man who would visit him every time the moon was full. However, it took growing older to learn about what Harry had to do to get his godfather, whom he had fallen in love with, back among the living. Based extremely loosely on the fairy tale “Godfather Death.”

Notes:

This is the first of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It’s also frankly rather weird, and my first Harry/Sirius fic, as well as a massive AU. It will have two parts.

Chapter 1

Harry was crying in his cupboard under the stairs. He knew that he’d been bad earlier, when he’d used magic to make the food fly from Dudley’s plate to his, but he’d been so hungry. Aunt Petunia was like the wicked stepmother in “Hansel and Gretel” who starved the children. Except she was starving Harry.

He was just so tired of being hungry all the time.

He looked up as something moved outside the cupboard, and hastily dried his tears. If Dudley was outside, then he would make fun of Harry for being a baby.

But the something moved through the wall, and Harry sighed, smiled, and stretched out his hands. Padfoot visiting couldn’t make up completely for being hungry all the time when he was just six years old, but it made up for a lot.

Padfoot’s ghostly tongue touched his ear, except that since it was the night of the full moon, Harry could feel it, like a fleeting cool sensation. He giggled and leaned harder on the dog. He saw him all the time, a huge black hound watching from the side of the schoolyard or in the classroom or behind the kitchen table, but most of the time, he was a ghost.

Now, Harry could touch him.

“Will you tell me the story again?” he whispered.

Padfoot shimmered, and his black fur blinked back and forth like static on the telly. Sitting in his place was Sirius, Harry’s godfather and the most handsome man he had ever, ever seen. Harry had heard Aunt Petunia and Mrs. Number 6 talking about some film star they thought was the handsomest ever, but Harry knew it was Sirius. His eyes were a brilliant grey, and he had hair as dark as Padfoot’s fur, and his skin was like—

Like the moon, Harry decided, the way he did every time. There had to be a better comparison, but he didn’t know what it was.

“You know that old story, kiddo,” Sirius said, and ruffled his hair.

Harry leaned forwards and hugged him, and Sirius hugged back. “But I want to hear it again? Please?”

Sirius nodded and lay down next to him, and then started telling the story, in the same hushed voice he always used. Harry listened with devotion. He could recite the words himself by now, but it didn’t matter. It was still best when Sirius told it. Sirius was the only one in the world who cared about him.

It was like a fairy tale, except it had a wicked friend instead of a wicked stepmother. Peter Pettigrew was Sirius’s friend, and Remus Lupin’s friend, and the friend of Harry’s daddy, James. They taught him how to transform into a rat, and they took him on quests, and everyone was brave and friendly together. That was what Harry wanted to be like. He dreamed all the time that he was in Gryffindor with all of them.

But Peter grew jealous because James fell in love with Harry’s mum, Lily Evans, who was beautiful like a princess, and she fell in love with him. Peter was wicked and wanted Lily for himself. He tried to steal her away, but that didn’t work. He tried to give her a love potion, but that didn’t work.

So then he came to their house in the middle of the night, the house where Harry lived with his mummy and daddy, and he cast a terrible, evil spell. The spell was meant to kill Harry and his daddy and make his mum a willing slave who would do whatever Peter wanted.

(Harry always shivered when they got to that part of the story, and Sirius would hold him close).

But the spell backfired. It killed Harry’s daddy, but Harry’s mummy gave up her life to protect Harry, and took the magic pain on herself. Except the spell was so evil that it was tugging and pulling at Harry’s soul anyway, trying to make him die.

Then Sirius had arrived. He was a hero. He killed Peter, but the spell was still active, still tugging and pulling at Harry’s soul. Sirius couldn’t break it. So he transformed into a black hound and called on Death, which he had a connection with as a Grim, and promised to be Death’s servant forever in exchange for Harry living.

“And Padfoot getting to visit,” Harry said sleepily, tucked in his godfather’s arms that sometimes also shimmered into the image of huge black front legs stretched out on either side of him.

“Yes,” Sirius whispered into his hair. “Death’s not such a bad thing, Harry. I get to visit, and I get to hold you on the nights of the full moon. And I’m only sorry that no one else can see and hear me most of the time, and Remus let Albus convince him to put you here instead.”

“But Remus can’t take care of me,” Harry whispered. “Because he’s a werewolf.” Remus was under a curse, just like a lot of people in the fairy stories Harry liked, but there was no getting him out of it.

“Yes.” Sirius bowed his head and touched his cheek to Harry’s. Harry could feel it growing fur. Padfoot’s visit was almost over.

“When is the letter going to come?” Harry asked, the way he did all the time.

Sirius kissed him, and Harry liked it even though it did kind of feel like a dog’s sloppy wet kiss, too. “When you’re eleven, kiddo. Or the week before your birthday. You can wait, right? You can last a few more years?”

“O’ course.” Harry broke off to yawn. “I have you.”

A soft howl echoed around him, the Grim’s hunting howl, and then Padfoot faded and Harry was alone. But only for now.

*

The Hogwarts letter was dazzling, and so was the huge man who eventually arrived to take him to Diagon Alley because the Dursleys weren’t going to let him go. Harry beamed up at Hagrid. He felt safe with him. Hagrid was like a kind giant in a fairy tale. Besides, Sirius had said Harry could trust him.

Harry had wondered if it would be different, when he was in the magical world and surrounded by witches and wizards. Would someone else be able to see the Grim, then? Would Sirius have to go into hiding?

But Sirius paced right beside him, tongue happily hanging out, and no one saw him. Hagrid bought Harry a beautiful white owl, and from the intense way she stared at the air next to his side, Harry thought for a second she was going to alert Hagrid that Sirius was there. But in the end, she just turned her head away, as if saying that ghostly Grims were a problem for humans.

Harry had to try lots of wands before he found the right one, which made Sirius sit back and laugh at him with shining teeth and chattering jaws. And when he did find the right holly wood and phoenix feather one, the wandmaker gave him a strange look.

“What is it, Mr. Ollivander?” Harry asked, waving the wand around and making blue and bronze sparks fly from it. Hagrid clapped and cheered for him, and Harry smiled up at him.

“That wand had a brother,” Mr. Ollivander said quietly. “A yew wand, with a phoenix feather for its core. From the same phoenix, you understand. Cores from the same creature bind wands together. I would say that you and the young man chosen by that wand had similar destinies, except…”

Harry looked at him politely. “Except what, Mr. Ollivander?”

“He died young.” Mr. Olllivander frowned at the wall as if looking back into the past. “An accident of some sort with a powerful spell he was attempting. His wand refused to work for anyone else, and was buried with him.” He turned back to Harry without letting go of the frown. “Do promise me that you’ll be careful, Mr. Potter, to avoid your would-be brother’s fate.”

Harry thought, for a second, about what it would have been like to have a brother. (Dudley didn’t count). Maybe it would have been wonderful. But then a poisonous jealousy surged up in him. A brother he would have to share Sirius with?

No, thanks.

“I’ll remember that, Mr. Ollivander,” Harry said, and smiled at the wandmaker, while dropping a hand down so Sirius could lick it with a curl of a wild phantom tongue.

*

The Sorting Hat sat on Harry’s head for a long time, staring into his brain. Harry stirred uneasily as he felt it poking through his memories.

You’re not going to tell anyone about Sirius, are you? he asked anxiously.

Mr. Potter, I am not even sure how I would begin explaining, the Hat said dryly. And I am not sure what House to Sort you into, to tell the truth. Your thoughts are—different. It paused, and then murmured, No, wait. Your dearest heart’s desire is to find some way to let your godfather be with you all the time.

Yes. I know there’s a way. I just have to find it. I have to learn all I can to find it.

“RAVENCLAW!”

That was a bit of a surprise—Harry had always thought he would be in Gryffindor like his parents and Sirius—but it didn’t really matter, because Sirius was leaping up and down and barking silently, and his approval was the only approval that mattered to Harry. He beamed at Sirius, took the Hat off, and ran over to join his new House.

*

“Look what I found, kiddo.”

It was the night of the full moon, the third one of Harry’s first year, and Harry was curled up on the bed in the Shrieking Shack where Moony used to spend all his time, with Sirius’s arms around him. They’d been talking softly about what Harry was learning in Charms and Transfiguration, and how silly it was that Professor Slughorn cared so much about his blood status, but this sounded different. Harry squirmed around on his elbows so he could look at his godfather.

Sirius was holding a battered old book. Harry squinted at it. It had letters stamped on the cover—someone’s initials, he thought. T. M. R.

“What’s that?”

“I think it was a diary kept by the student Ollivander told you about, the one who had your brother wand,” Sirius murmured, holding it out. “It has his notes about some of the spells he was attempting to learn when the accident happened to him. He doesn’t detail enough of what he’s talking about for me to be sure, but I think he wanted to conquer death.”

“Immortality?” Harry traced the cover and looked at it curiously. “Well, I suppose that could be interesting, but I don’t really want to be immortal, you know. I just want to find a way to be with you all the time.”

“But if I’m tied in a bargain to Death…”

Harry looked up with a huge smile. Of course, Sirius was right. And it seemed that Death didn’t punish him for trying to come up with ways to be free of its influence. Harry wasn’t even sure, from what Sirius had said, that Death was sentient enough for that. “Of course. I could use that. Thank you, Sirius.”

Sirius turned back into Padfoot and covered him with sloppy kisses, Harry wriggled, laughing.

And if he was thinking of other kinds of kisses with a human mouth, that was something that he could worry about, and Sirius didn’t have to.

*

“I made the best decision I could.”

Harry looked at Professor Dumbledore in puzzlement. He really didn’t have much to do with the Headmaster. Harry hadn’t had detention at all during his first year. He was just quiet and studious, even for a Ravenclaw, and spent all his time in the library. His professors assumed he was looking up information for his homework. And Harry did do his homework perfectly. It meant that no one would be looking at him while he went about researching spells that would horrify them if they knew.

So the summons from the Headmaster to meet him in his office at the end of the year was a surprise.

“I don’t blame you, sir,” Harry reassured the professor as best he could. “I know that my dad didn’t have any relatives left, and Uncle Remus couldn’t take me because he was a werewolf. There was really nowhere else, so you had to put me with my mother’s relatives. Thank you for making the decision. My parents named you in their will to make it if something happened to Uncle Sirius and Uncle Remus.” And if there had been magical relatives who could have taken Harry, then they might have had wards on their house that would have kept Sirius out. Harry couldn’t imagine his childhood without Padfoot. He really couldn’t.

The Headmaster gave a tense, unhappy sigh, and stared at Harry over his glasses. “I do not think your relatives treat you as they should.”

If you think that, why do you think you also made the best decision possible?

But Harry had long since accepted that he didn’t really understand people. And the Headmaster was only one more person who was out there, who could affect Harry, but who otherwise didn’t matter much. They weren’t Sirius.

Harry shrugged a little. “It’s okay, sir. They treat me better now that I have magic and I’m going to Hogwarts part of the year.” And if some of that was because, at the first full moon after he got his Hogwarts letter, Harry had had Padfoot snarl into his aunt’s and uncle’s faces, it didn’t matter. It just mattered that it worked.

Headmaster Dumbledore sat back and seemed to consider that a moment. Then he smiled. “So you’re willing to stay behind the blood wards? I know it probably doesn’t seem very dangerous in the magical world because the man who sought your mother is dead, but there are people who would be very interested if they knew the exact details of how you survived his curse and how I established the wards based on your mother’s sacrifice.”

Harry just shrugged. Sirius had reassured him that, although the Headmaster could read minds, he wouldn’t get much from trying to read Harry’s. Death itself protected the knowledge of Sirius’s existence.

And the word of the spell that had affected him, the spell Sirius had sacrificed his freedom to stop, wouldn’t have got out at all if Headmaster Dumbledore hadn’t talked about it.

Maybe Harry had room for a grudge, after all.

“Dismissed, Mr. Potter.”

*

Harry’s second year at Hogwarts was a little different from the first one. He made a friend in his own House, a little blonde girl named Luna Lovegood. She told him that she also liked to look into strange corners and make friends with people others couldn’t see. She said it came from witnessing her mother’s death.

“You did?” Harry asked, a little envious. He could see someone who served Death, but he had never seen someone die, so thestrals remained invisible to him. “What did you see?”

They were in a corner of the Ravenclaw common room where people left them alone. Some of the older girls had tried to bully Luna earlier that year, but they had started leaving her alone after Harry had had Padfoot appear to them during a full moon. Being glared at by a Grim while an echoing voice (courtesy of the Ventriloquism Charm Harry had learned) told them to leave Luna alone was an effective anti-bully spell.

Luna’s face was very solemn. “Not much. She died in a potions accident. There was a burst of activity around her, and magic, and then nargles.”

“Nargles?”

“I see people other people don’t think exist. Some of them are nargles.”

Harry nodded. “So they’re associated with death?” He wondered why Sirius had never mentioned them.

A ghostly head pushed under his hand. Harry smiled and left his hand at just the right height to touch Padfoot’s head. They were both good at that now after years of practice, even though Harry couldn’t actually touch Sirius except during the full moon.

Someday, that will change.

“I don’t know,” Luna answered after a long moment. She picked up some rubber bands and began to braid them into her hair. “I saw them then, and I’ve seen them since. But not always around thestrals. Sometimes I see them just flitting through the corridors here. No one ever pays attention to them. So maybe they’re associated with the living.”

She turned and stared at Harry. “They don’t like coming near you.”

“I suppose they aren’t associated with death, then,” Harry said. He suspected that few people were more associated with death than he was, having one of Death’s chosen servants around all the time.

Well, most of the time. Sometimes Sirius had to fulfill his terms of the bargain, of course, and he had to leave Harry’s side to hunt down people or whatever a Grim actually did. Harry had rarely asked him, and Sirius didn’t like to talk about it when he did.

“Maybe not,” Luna said, and their conversation turned to other things. It could, although the commitment to get close to Sirius hummed always in the back of Harry’s mind.

*

The other thing that made his second year at Hogwarts different was that Sirius came to him excitedly one night, still in ghostly form, and leaped ahead of Harry through the walls and corridors. Harry couldn’t walk through walls (yet), so it took him longer to figure out where Sirius wanted him to go. But finally he stood outside a little portion of a wall on the sixth floor where he managed, with Sirius’s help thrusting his head in and out of the bricks and stone, to find the latch of a hidden door.

Harry opened the door, stepped inside the small, dusty chamber beyond, and gasped.

The ghost of the teenage boy who was floating near the sole window turned around quickly and stared at Harry. Even dead and washed grey, he still had piercing dark eyes, and they looked at Sirius as he crouched next to Harry in dog form, too.

That impressed Harry. None of the other ghosts at Hogwarts could see Sirius unless it was a full moon night, just like most people. Peeves the poltergeist sometimes seemed to sense something, but other than zooming away from Harry really fast when he saw him and shutting up when Sirius padded down a corridor, he didn’t do anything different.

“Who are you?” the ghost asked, turning his head back and forth to make it clear that he was including both Harry and Sirius in the conversation. “How did you find me?”

“Sirius found you first,” Harry said, and let his fingers dangle at the proper height, as usual. “But I don’t know for sure why he wanted me to come and see you.”

Sirius, who couldn’t make noises except on full moon nights, reared and pawed excitedly at Harry’s robe pocket. Harry obediently reached into it and took out the diary that Sirius had found for him last year. He was slowly reading through it, but he hadn’t understood the whole thing yet.

“That’s my diary.”

Harry looked up at the ghost. “Is it? You died doing one of the rituals in here, then?”

“Yes.” The ghost floated nearer, staring at him. “How did you find it? One of my followers took it away from this room after I—was gone, and hid it somewhere. I haven’t seen it since then.”

“Sirius found it somewhere in Hogwarts,” Harry said. He had never cared to ask more than that. “He brought it to me because he thought, when he found it, that it might belong to the dead boy Ollivander told me about when I bought my wand.”

The ghost frowned. “Why would he mention me?”

“I have the wand that’s the brother to yours. Same phoenix gave the feather for the core,” Harry added, when he saw that the ghost didn’t appear to know what a brother wand was.

The ghost drifted towards him, still staring. Then he shook his head. “And you came to seek me out?”

“No, I have another goal, but Sirius found it and said that it looked like the diary of someone who was trying to conquer death. Since I wanted to do something similar, I started reading it. Then he found you and he came and found me. I’m not sure why, actually.” Harry glanced down at Sirius. For all that he was always in dog form like this and couldn’t speak aloud, he could make himself understood most of the time.

Sirius gamboled in a circle for a second, his silvery tongue hanging out. Then he gave a huge, silent woof and looked back and forth between Harry and the ghost.

“Huh,” Harry said. “I think he thinks you can teach me.”

“Why should I do that?”

Harry shrugged. “What else do you have to do?”

For a long moment, the ghost stared at him, eyes stretched so wide that Harry thought he would attack. And then he began to laugh, a creaky sound that reminded Harry of what the door to the little chamber had sounded like. Sirius wagged his tail and leaned pointedly against Harry’s side. Harry touched him, although all he could feel was a slight coldness where his fingers passed through the silvery tinge of Sirius’s coat. Even that was more than he had felt years ago, and it contented him.

(For now).

“Yes,” the boy said. “I might as well, at that. And my name is Tom. Tom Marvolo Riddle.”

*

Harry learned quickly that Tom’s goal had been to make Horcruxes, because Tom bragged about it at every opportunity. Harry didn’t see what was so smart about doing that. After all, Horcruxes sounded like they drove you insane, from the description in the book, and trying to do it had killed Tom.

Tom always scowled whenever Harry reminded him of that. “Someone sabotaged the book I was using,” he muttered. “Removed vital information. I would have succeeded if not for that.”

Harry couldn’t imagine who would want to, but he just nodded agreeably whenever Tom started talking like that. It was a small enough price to pay. And Tom was teaching him a lot.

For one thing, the Horcrux ritual, although it wasn’t something Harry wanted to use himself, did do something fascinating. It opened a door to Death’s realm in the middle of the circle. It was only meant to last a moment, enough for the piece of soul that was detached in the ritual to pass through the door and come back, somehow stronger, to be attached to an object and keep the maker immortal.

But what if it lasted longer than a moment? Harry thought. What if it could be held open, and someone could step through? Someone going either way?

He wasn’t sure at the moment if he wanted to go through himself and rescue Sirius from Death’s service, or if he wanted Sirius to step through as himself, whole and alive again. Honestly, it didn’t really matter to him how he accomplished it. As long as they could be together forever.

*

“Your handwritten runes are terrible,” Tom muttered after they’d been working together for a few months, scowling down at the parchment on the floor where Harry had drawn the ones he was practicing.

“I just need the carved ones to be precise,” Harry said, with a shrug. “For what I have in mind.”

Tom stared at him, his face flushing with a little color that changed the grey to white, the way he only did in moments of strong emotion. “What do you have in mind?”

“To get my godfather back from Death.”

Tom threw back his head and laughed. Harry shook his head at him and went on working. Tom didn’t have to listen or help him. Harry didn’t think Tom was in the habit of helping anyone but himself, from some of the things he’d seen. But he also didn’t have the right to disrupt what Harry was doing.

“You can’t break the kind of bargain Black made,” Tom said, when he stopped laughing.

“And the Horcrux ritual should have utterly destroyed you. Got rid of your soul, so that you couldn’t stay here even as a ghost. Did it?”

Tom scowled at him, and floated over to the side to look at the runes Harry was writing down again. “I don’t see how getting good at runes will allow you to enter Death’s realm. If it was that easy, someone would have done it already.”

“I don’t think anyone ever made the bargain Sirius has, plus had the person they made it for come seeking them.”

Tom sighed noisily. “You’re not a genius, the way I was.”

“Good thing, too. I’m not about to mess around with a Horcrux ritual that’s going to kill me.”

Tom vanished with a sharp pop. Harry ignored that, and kept drawing his runes. He knew Tom would come back soon. He seemed to never leave the small chamber where he appeared to have died for very long.

There was a soft whine next to him. Harry looked up, startled. It wasn’t a night of the full moon, and Sirius shouldn’t have been able to make sounds, whether they were human or dog sounds.

Sirius stretched his paws towards Harry and worked his jaws around sounds that weren’t words. It seemed that that one sound was all he could make. Harry bent down and obediently watched his jaws as much as possible, to try and read the words he was trying to form.

He finally thought he’d made them out, and smiled a little. Sirius was saying, You don’t have to do this.

“I know I don’t have to,” Harry said, and let his hand skim along the air above his godfather’s head. “But I do want to, and I want you back. And if it turns out that it doesn’t work, at least I know I tried and didn’t just leave you trapped in servitude to Death forever.”

Sirius curled up with his nose on his tail and watched Harry with huge, mournful eyes. Harry shook his head a little and went to fetch the next piece of parchment he’d need.

He would do this. He would have Sirius back. He would have all he’d ever dreamed of.

Because he wanted it.

Chapter 2

Notes:

Thanks for all the reviews! This now has three parts, but the third part will be the last.

“Where do you go during the summers?”

Harry stretched and leaned back. It was his third year, and although he’d warned Tom that he’d disappear for several weeks—and he didn’t think ghosts had the same sense of time as humans, anyway—the ghost had been asking him questions non-stop since he got back.

Well, why not? Harry needed to take a break from scribbling all these runes on the parchment spread out in the middle of the chamber anyway, and Sirius wasn’t here right now. He seemed to spend a lot of time away from Harry when he was working on the portal into Death’s realm, as if he assumed that showing he had no interest in Harry changing things would mean Harry would lose interest in it, too.

Harry never would. He thought of the way Sirius’s eyes had darkened to true, shining grey on the last full moon night they’d shared, and shivered.

“Potter, are you paying attention to me?”

Right, Tom Riddle hated to be ignored. Harry shrugged. “I live in the Muggle world, with my mother’s sister and her family.”

“I had no idea your mother was a Mudblood.”

“And I had no idea you were an idiot.”

Tom gaped at him. Harry rolled his eyes and went back to drawing his runes. He didn’t look up when the ghost disappeared in a fit of pique, either. He had far too much on his mind to worry about Tom’s anger.

*

“I think I need to show you more of what I do for Death.”

Sirius’s voice was carefully controlled. Harry smiled up at him. It was the second full moon of his third year, and they had spent the first one just sitting cuddled together in the Shrieking Shack, Sirius whispering his favorite fairy stories from when he was young to Harry. They all had bittersweet endings, where someone accomplished a great feat of magic and then died, or two people fell in love and then died.

Harry knew full well that Sirius was trying to tell him something. He just didn’t know why Sirius thought it would work. If those were really Sirius’s favorite stories, it only proved how much he and Harry belonged together.

“All right,” Harry agreed easily as he stepped out of the tunnel into the Shack with Sirius walking beside him. “I’d like to see it.”

Sirius paused, his eyes flashing once. “I wondered why you haven’t approached Remus this year, since he’s teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts. I know you know who he is.”

“Why hasn’t he approached me?” Harry asked softly. “He just watches me with wistful eyes. And the one time I did tell him that I’d like to talk to him privately, he made all sorts of excuses.”

Sirius blew out a slow breath. “I think Remus thinks he’s protecting you. Keeping you safe from his lycanthropy.”

Harry laughed. “He ought to know from the questions I ask in class that I love dangerous things.”

“Not love, Harry. You mustn’t say that.”

“Why not?”

Sirius’s eyes were desperate as he smiled, but no less loving for all that. Harry sat there on the bed in the Shack, drinking it in. God, there was no one else in the world who loved him. His parents were dead. Luna was a good friend, but not close enough for Harry to trust her with the inner secrets of his soul. Remus had already proven he would hold himself at a distance. Harry didn’t think Tom would know what love was if it rent his ghost form in two.

And the less said about the Dursleys, the better.

“Death granted me the right to come to you on full moon nights, and in a ghostly form the rest of the time,” Sirius whispered. “Because of my love for you. But if she thought that you loved me in the way you’re saying you do…”

“She?” Harry perked up. That was the first time Sirius had ever used a pronoun for Death other than it. “What’s she like?”

“She granted me leave to show you. Because she doesn’t want you dying during the ritual the way Tom did. It would—” Sirius’s eyes quickly flickered, lashes down and then over his eyes. “It would sadden me enough that I might grieve myself into non-existence, and then she would lose her servant.”

She doesn’t want me opening a door into her realm, because she thinks I might succeed.

Harry smiled a little, and didn’t say it. “All right. I really do want to see what you do for her. But I wanted to ask you one question first.”

“Yes, kiddo?” Sirius smiled, but his eyes were anxious.

“You do love me, right? It’s not just that you loved me when I was a kid and you made that bargain, but you love me now?”

Sirius’s mouth dropped open a little and he leaned over to grab Harry into a tight hug. Harry leaned close and shut his eyes to feel the shifting of cloth against him. Sirius always wore black robes with silver accents when he was like this, the robes he had worn the night Harry’s parents died. And he smelled like sweat and human, instead of hound.

“Of course,” Sirius whispered, his voice hushed. “You’re the center of my life, kiddo. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. There’s no risk I wouldn’t take. I just want you to understand me a little better, so you can see the risks you shouldn’t take.”

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Which meant, when Harry succeeded, Sirius would love him the way he wanted to be loved.

Harry smiled. “Then I want to see.”

*

Long after Sirius had returned him to the school, Harry lay alone in his bed in the Ravenclaw third year boys’ bedroom, turning the precious images over and over in his mind. Sirius had warned him they would be hard to understand, and it would be more like Harry’s mind translating the reality of Death’s realm into images than seeing it. But Harry didn’t care. He had been there, and now he had an idea of what he was looking for when he opened the door in the ritual circle.

Sirius had taken him to a cold and freezing dark moor. The brightest thing had been the snowflakes glowing on the ground like shards of crystal, lit from within by rotten light.

Sirius had transformed into a dog the minute he set Harry in the middle of a circle of snow and took a step away. He had thrown his head back and howled, a lingering, echoing sound that bounced back from invisible walls.

And thousands of other howls answered him.

Harry saw—he didn’t see—he saw and he thought he understood—

Even in his bed afterwards, the vision trembled and snapped like the surface of a bubble, ready to pop. Harry held still, not even shaking his head, because that would make the vision flee and dissipate. He breathed shallowly, and he watched.

And he saw the Hunt.

The Hunt had been black hounds coursing after the souls that Death took. Harry had vaguely thought that Death would simply reach out and snatch someone she wanted to take, or maybe inflict death as a punishment on someone like Tom, who had tried to win immortality. But no, it was a Hunt. Souls were run down and condemned to pant with terror like animals.

Why? Because Death wanted it that way.

Harry watched, and he saw that Sirius led them, and that he was the largest, proudest, darkest hound of all. His fur rippled around him, not in motion but with long grooves of motion carved into it like black ice, and he charged, and his eyes turned red like glowing coals, and he was at Death’s right hand as she coursed the souls with her pack. Death was a woman, was not a woman, snapping and flickering in and out of Harry’s comprehension.

But the hounds, the hounds were real.

Harry saw one soul go down trapped and screaming in Sirius’s jaws. Sirius flung his head back and snapped his neck up and then down, breaking something far more essential in the soul than its back. Then he turned and offered the prey with a soft, glittering mouth to Death, who took it and examined it.

Sirius turned a second later and grasped Harry’s eyes with his own. Words, stronger than words, pressed into Harry’s mind and worked themselves into something more like a lather.

The first soul I did that to was Wormtail. I became her servant to save you, but I also became her servant because she promised to let me do that.

Harry shivered, and he knew. Sirius was a monster. He wasn’t just the ghostly hound who watched over Harry. Visions avalanched down into Harry’s head, moving like the snow here couldn’t, and he knew.

Sirius had the Grim Animagus form for a reason. He hunted people down. He enjoyed the work. He had loved appearing to the girls who had tormented Luna, and he had marked their souls for his own personal prey when they died. There was no one who would be spared this fear, except Sirius and others like him who had become hounds, and that was only because they would never truly die.

Sirius was looking forward even to hunting Harry, when he died and his soul passed into Death’s realm.

The terror of that swirled around and around Harry like a cascade of water meant to drown him. Sirius wanted to rend him, terrify him, hold him, shake him.

Possess him.

And Harry opened his eyes, and lay undrowned, basking in that miracle, for a long time.

*

“If even half of what you told me is true, why are you pursuing this ritual?”

Harry tilted his head back and watched Tom for a second. The ghost had been fascinated by what Harry had told him of Death’s realm, but had fixated on the part about the hounds, asking question after question over and over again. At first, Harry had thought it was because Tom thought he could somehow escape his ghostly state and slip back into existence, Horcrux intact, if he asked enough questions about the actions of the hounds with souls before they passed over.

Now, though, Harry thought Tom’s ghost probably didn’t remember being hunted by the hounds, or had only faint memories and was trying to reconcile what Harry had told him with what he knew. Harry had no idea how ghosts worked with the Hunt. Were they perhaps torn scraps of the souls the hounds brought to Death? Or allowed to partially return to the world to amuse her?

Then again, Harry didn’t really care. He wasn’t a ghost and wasn’t about to become one.

“I want to be with Sirius,” Harry said, in simple answer to Tom’s question, and went back to carving the rune on the stone.

“But he’s a—monster. You said that he thinks that himself.”

“Yes,” Harry agreed.

“How can you want to be with him?”

“He was the only one who was there. He was the only one who gave a damn that I was living in a cupboard under the stairs. And I love him,” Harry said, ignoring the way that the ghost scoffed at him. Tom, it had become rapidly clear, didn’t believe in love. He believed in power.

He could. But as Harry was prone to think, look where that belief had got him.

“You could do so much with the amount of skill and magic that you have,” Tom whispered, prowling around the circle of rune-carved stones Harry had established. “And you choose to waste it looking for a door into Death’s realm and reaching out to a man who has warned you away from him.”

Harry half-smiled as he finished the carving on the Sowilo rune and set it aside. He hadn’t told Tom about the possessiveness roaring through the vision Sirius had shared with him, because that only belonged to Harry. But he knew Sirius felt the same way he did, knew that if Sirius had wanted to chase him away forever, he could have chosen harsh words that would have butchered Harry’s heart.

But he hadn’t.

“Why are you wasting it?”

Harry tossed his hair out of his eyes as he looked up at Tom. “You’re the only one here who thinks that,” he said. “And you’re welcome to go elsewhere if you don’t want to help me with what you knew I was going to do.”

Tom vanished with a sharp pop that sounded like Apparition. Harry shook his head and turned back to survey the runes. He thought the circle could be improved in a few ways, but it was as close to good as he could make it.

Which meant he had to turn his attention to the other, and more difficult part, of establishing a doorway: envisioning Death’s realm the way he wanted it to be when he stepped through.

*

“Stay after class, please, Mr. Potter.”

Professor Lupin sounded as though he was finally going to be open to a private conversation, Harry thought. He turned around and stood next to the door as the other Ravenclaws filed out, then waited as the professor locked the door and lifted a few anti-eavesdropping charms.

Sirius appeared next to him, head cocked wistfully at Lupin. He seemed to have given up on the idea that Harry and Lupin could establish a close, friendly relationship, but Harry wasn’t surprised he wanted to be here for this conversation. Harry let his hand hover in the air, and smiled as Sirius’s ghostly form brushed against his fingers.

“Mr. Potter,” said Professor Lupin, and then hesitated again.

Harry sighed to himself. He didn’t hate Lupin, and he understood why the man hadn’t been able to take care of him after his parents had died. But he did dislike the man’s indecisiveness, and how even now, he didn’t appear to want to say anything about his past with Harry’s father and Sirius.

“Did you know,” Professor Lupin began at last, slowly, “that you reek of Dark Arts?”

Huh. I didn’t know a werewolf’s nose could smell those. Harry ignored the way that Sirius’s ears had flattened to his head, and instead gave Professor Lupin the most innocent smile he could muster. “No, I didn’t. Sorry if it bothered you, sir.”

“Why do you reek of Dark Arts?” Professor Lupin persisted, and shifted a little to the side. He hadn’t drawn his wand, Harry saw, but he was in a position that meant he could easily do so. “Give me the truth, child.”

“I don’t think I will,” Harry said. Even Sirius’s old friend would probably disapprove of Harry’s desire to get Sirius out of Death’s realm, the way Tom did. No one who hadn’t been there for Harry’s childhood could possibly understand.

“What?” Lupin stared at Harry as if that was the last thing he had expected. Then he shook his head and sighed sadly. “I’m sorry, Harry, but I think that the Dark Arts you’ve been using must have driven you mad. I’ll need to report you to the Headmaster.”

“Do that and I’ll tell everyone that you’re a werewolf.”

Lupin’s face went far paler than he had so far. He swayed. Sirius shifted next to Harry, and Harry glanced at him. But Sirius wasn’t pawing at him or stepping in to defend Lupin with his shadowy form. He stayed where he was, tail held curved between his back legs as he stared at Lupin.

“How—how did you know?” Lupin finally whispered.

“You were one of my dad’s best friends. Why wouldn’t I know?” Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t really want to do this, you know. I don’t think it’s fair that you can’t hold a job just because you’re a werewolf, and I don’t really want to see you sacked. But you’re not going to report me to the Headmaster.”

Lupin licked his lips. “What if I said that he already knew about me?”

“It’s not him I would be telling, is it?” Harry smiled at Lupin, and he knew it was a mean smile. That had been one thing he was more than glad to take lessons in from Tom. “I wonder how much damage it would do to any future you might have in magical Britain, for the news to get out that the Headmaster had permitted a werewolf to be in the same classroom as precious pureblood children.”

Sirius leaned a little towards Harry, and still made no move to defend Lupin. Harry had been about ninety percent sure that he wouldn’t, but he was glad to see it nonetheless.

Sirius had chosen his side, and he stood where he always had since the night he had become Death’s hound: with Harry.

“You’re so different from the way I thought you were,” Lupin whispered finally, his eyes fixed on Harry and his nose twitching as if that stink of Dark Arts still bothered him.

“You gave up any chance you had to make a difference. You didn’t even tell me the truth this year. So it’s a little late to be acting like you care about me now.”

Lupin looked off to the side, flinched, and nodded.

He was always flinching, Harry thought as he looked at the werewolf and recalled some of Sirius’s stories. He always held back when they played their best pranks, but then he wanted to claim credit and pretend he was a true friend with all the rest of them. Or if he really thought what they were doing was wrong, he should have stood up against them and told them so.

But he never made a decision. He just huddled in the background and hoped not to be noticed.

At least Harry had made a fucking decision as to what he wanted, and what he needed, and what he would do.

*

“The nargles are always around you now.”

Harry glanced up at Luna with a smile as she came to sit next to him in a corner of the Ravenclaw common room. She was always the only one. Although most of Harry’s Housemates had been content to ignore him once they found out he didn’t make friends, they had started actively avoiding him this year.

Harry wondered if it had to do with the stink of Dark Arts that Lupin had mentioned. He wished he could do something about that if so, so he wouldn’t get found out as easily. But he knew the only way to get rid of it would probably be to stop completely.

“They are?” he asked Luna. “Can they sense that I’m getting near my goal?”

Luna stared at him with great, solemn eyes. Harry reached out and tweaked a strand of her hair in response. He didn’t like to see her looking so solemn.

“Have you considered what could happen if it goes wrong?” Luna whispered.

Harry nodded. “Then I think I’ll probably be dead.”

“And that doesn’t matter to you? It doesn’t matter to the Hound?”

“It matters,” Harry said, glancing off to the side, where Sirius lay next to the couch and dozed in the firelight. He had said he couldn’t feel the heat, but that light was sort of the same thing for someone in the form that he was in. “But not as much as being with him does.”

Luna tilted her head. “Has anyone tried to stop you? The nargles are swarming around you so thickly that I thought someone tried.”

“A few people have told me they don’t think it’s a good idea,” Harry said, his mind going to Professor Lupin. “But they don’t really know what I’m doing. They just have these vague ideas about what’s good for me.”

“Talk to someone whose ideas aren’t vague.”

“Don’t you count?” Harry tried to tease her, although he thought it fell a little flat.

“Oh, no,” said Luna, and shook her head. “My ideas are very vague. They’ve been vague since my mother died.” She sighed. “Sometimes I miss her.”

Harry reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Should I talk to her if I see her? Tell her that you miss her?”

“Oh, no,” Luna repeated, looking shocked. “The living and the dead aren’t meant to mix. Unless someone can do it by becoming half-dead themselves.” She pulled a small blue book out of her pocket and dropped it into Harry’s hands. “You should read this. I know you like old stories. These were written by an ancestor of mine.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this book in the library,” Harry said, as he flicked through the pages. And he knew it would have if it was there. He’d sought out every possible book that had magical fairy tales in it.

“No, it was privately printed. Most people didn’t like the way my ancestor thought.” Luna stood up and touched Harry on the ear. “I wish you good luck. You should bathe your earlobe in water on a full moon night.”

Sirius raised his head and gave Luna a wary look, but Harry didn’t think they had anything to worry about. Luna was just Luna, and someone who obviously didn’t mind that Harry reeked of Dark Arts, if she could even smell it.

“All right,” Harry said. “Thanks, Luna.”

She smiled at him and wandered upstairs. Harry picked up the blue book and began to read.

*

Harry could see why the stories the way Luna’s ancestor had told them had never found favor with the public. Most of them were versions of stories Harry already knew, like the “Tale of the Three Brothers,” but they all ended with darkness and death, or someone losing a hand, or vengeful dragons burning out someone’s eyes.

Then again, that was no darker than some versions of Muggle stories Harry had read. Or than the story that Sirius had told him over and over since before Harry was capable of understanding the words.

The ending of this version of “The Three Brothers” was intriguing, however. It showed Death as a woman who had come to claim her cloak back from Ignotus Peverell, but he had begged to keep something of hers with him because he had grown so used to her cold touch, swearing to make a bargain with her and offer her whatever she wanted. Death had laughed.

“And then she led him into a room in which candles burned, so many candles for so many lives, and told him that she needed nothing from him, not when she had all the lives of the world in her keeping. And Ignotus Peverell stole a cold silver candlestick from her and ran back into the world. And Death could not find him, because he hid under her cloak.”

But in the end, of course, she had found him, when he was dying of old age. Ignotus Peverell held out the silver candlestick to her.

“He told her, with his dying breath, that it was worth it, to have had something of her cold glory with him all his life. And when her hounds ended him, Death was so moved that she took his soul up with her and made it her coal-black horse, which she rides to this day.”

Harry shut the book when he was done and looked thoughtfully into the common room fire. He hadn’t seen a horse in the vision that Sirius had shown him, but then again, he had known what he was seeing wasn’t exactly reality.

It was worth thinking of. And since he would have little to do when he went back to the Dursleys the next day other than think, he continued turning the story over in his mind.

*

“I ought to have given this back to you long since, my dear boy. I hope you’ll forgive an old man his forgetfulness.”

Harry smiled. “It’s all right, sir. I appreciate you giving it back now.”

He stroked the Invisibility Cloak that Dumbledore had handed across the desk. At least, once the man had remembered, he didn’t hesitate to give it back. This was the first night of Harry’s fourth year, and he’d immediately been summoned to the man’s office to receive the gift. Sirius sat up beside him with his tail trembling back and forth. He’d told Harry stories about James Potter’s cloak, but he hadn’t known where it was.

I deserve some luck for once, what with all the bad luck that my life has been plagued with so far.

“Harry, my dear boy, may I ask you something?”

Harry looked up and blinked. “Sure, sir.” He folded up the Cloak—it was as soft and flexible as Sirius had always said it was—and tucked it carefully into one of his robe pockets.

“One of the professors reported to me that you appeared to be getting into Dark Arts.” Dumbledore’s face was grave, and he folded his hands on top of the desk. “I told him not to be ridiculous, but on second thought, I could not dismiss his words without further consideration.”

Professor Lupin, right. The man was gone now, maybe because Harry’s threat to reveal his curse bothered him too much. And he never had actually told Harry of his own free will that he’d been a friend of Harry’s parents.

Harry arranged his face in a careful expression of sorrow. “That was Professor Lupin, right, sir?” He waited until the Headmaster had nodded, and went on, “I think it was honestly just his own guilt catching up with him.”

“His own guilt?”

Harry nodded. “I know that he wanted to take care of me after my parents died. But he decided it was best if I wasn’t raised by a werewolf. And then I think he wanted to tell me that he was friends with my mum and dad when he was here, but he never did. He kept stepping back and hesitating, and even when he asked me to stay after class near the end of the year, he didn’t actually talk to me about what it was like for him to be friends with them. He felt guilty, but he probably thought he was protecting me.”

“Why would that make him think that you were practicing Dark Arts?”

Harry sighed and stared at the Headmaster for a moment. “Because he wasn’t there to protect me. And so that must have meant I was getting into Dark Arts, without a proper Marauder to watch over me. And since I’m not in Gryffindor.”

Even though there was a proper Marauder to watch over me all along.

“Well,” the Headmaster said, and frowned a little. “He did wait until the summer to owl me…”

Harry nodded. He’d reckoned that, or Dumbledore would have called him up to talk to him at the end of last year. “And he didn’t say that he knew I was practicing Dark Arts and I’d better be careful. He just offered this vague warning that really had nothing to do with anything.” Harry sighed. “I understand why he couldn’t raise me. But I don’t want his guilt complex making him spread lies, either.”

“It does seem odd that he never openly told you he was friends with your parents,” the Headmaster conceded. “Very well, Mr. Potter, just be careful about your visits to the odd corners of the library.” He smiled benevolently at Harry. “And enjoy your Cloak.”

“Yes, sir,” Harry said, and slipped out of the office with Sirius at his heels, his hand dipping into his robe pocket to touch his Cloak again.

He knew the stories about cloaks, and he also knew that this one had been around at least since his great-grandfather’s time, from what Sirius had said. Invisibility Cloaks didn’t normally last that long, no matter how well they were taken care of.

Harry couldn’t stop smiling. I think I’ve found something that Death will be willing to bargain with me over.

The book Luna had given him never did say that Death got back her original cloak, after all.

Chapter 3

Notes:

Thank you again for the reviews! This is the last chapter of this story, and I hope you enjoy it.

“Have you heard about the Triwizard Tournament?”

Harry nodded vaguely in response to Tom’s question. “Yeah, they’re holding it because they want to show that the three most prominent European magical schools have close ties, or something. They apparently had quarrels between the Headmasters and Headmistresses in the past.” He squinted down at the circle of grey stones in front of him.

Something was wrong, but he didn’t know what it was. He had to figure it out before he went to bed, though, no matter that he was currently drooping with exhaustion. Otherwise, his worries wouldn’t let him sleep.

“Are you going to compete?”

That question startled Harry enough to make him turn his head and stare at Tom. Tom floated on air, folded his arms, and stared back in the way he had when he thought Harry’s answer to a question was immensely important, whether or not he had explained to Harry why that was.

“Of course not. Why would I?”

“You have an immense amount of magical power.” Tom vanished and reappeared near the small window on the far side of the room, where Harry had first seen him. He uncrossed his arms and frowned at Harry for a moment. “And you could use the money that the tournament would pay the champion to buy books that aren’t in Hogwarts.”

Harry shook his head. “Even if they hadn’t restricted the tournament to of-age students, I don’t need the books. I’ve chosen my path and I’m near enough to stepping onto it.”

“What?”

Tom’s voice was high-pitched enough that Harry winced. But he nodded and drew out the parchment with his notes on it. “I have an idea about what to do once I’m in Death’s realm.”

Tom twisted upside-down to read what he’d written, while Harry went back to contemplating the circle. He squinted until his eyes ached in the Lumos light coming from his wand. And then he glanced back at the notes that Tom was still studying, and his eyes widened.

Of course.

If he was really going to do what he wanted to do once he reached Death’s realm, then he had to make sure that all the steps along the way were conducted in the same manner. In the same light.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the candles that he normally kept beside his bed to read by after his roommates had gone to bed. He ended up having to cast a Sticking Charm to keep it wedged upright between the chinks of the flagstones, but he managed in the end, and sprawled on his belly beside the circle of stones, staring at it in the candlelight.

Yes. There. Of course. The stones that were supposed to guide him on his way to Death’s realm were out of order. Harry sighed and reordered them, shaking his head at himself. That was an obvious mistake that he should have seen right away.

But he couldn’t have, because it was literally in the wrong light.

Harry smiled smugly. That was the best proof he had acquired yet for his theories about Death’s realm being right.

“You’re intending to shape her realm to your vision.”

Harry rolled over on his side to look at Tom. Tom was still hovering above the parchment, but he was staring at Harry instead of it, and his brow was furrowed.

Harry nodded. “Everyone who goes into Death’s realm sees something different, and Sirius told me that no one sees what’s actually there, except Death herself. I might as well work with what I think is true, and she’ll bend herself into the forms and employ them if she finds them useful or amusing enough.”

“And once you’re through the door into her realm, what then?”

“Then I make the bargain with her,” Harry breathed. He looked again at the candle, and then at the stones. They cast shadows that writhed and danced back and forth with the flickering light, in a way that they never had when his charm was the only illumination.

Harry smiled. Who would want to participate in a tournament when they had a chance to enter Death’s realm and survive?

He glanced across the circle at Sirius, who had been asleep for most of the evening, and smiled to see that his godfather had his head raised and was staring straight at Harry. And there was no warning in his eyes, and his tail was drumming on the floor, although of course without raising a sound.

Instead, his eyes blazed with hope.

*

“Harry, I can’t believe it.” Sirius’s voice was reverent as he examined Harry’s notes and then turned the Cloak back and forth in his hands. “You might actually have a chance to enter Death’s door…”

He trailed off. Harry leaned towards him and soaked in Sirius’s warmth all along his side. It was the third full moon night of his fourth year, and he had gathered the only ingredient he was missing for his ritual, ashes from dragonfire, earlier that evening. No one had noticed someone sneaking back to the area of the First Task once it was done and the dragons were gone.

“You could really do it,” Sirius breathed, and his voice broke.

Harry leaned against him harder, and Sirius turned to look down at him. They were in a deserted classroom not that far from Tom’s chamber. Harry didn’t want to share his rare moments with Sirius even with a ghost.

“I know that I haven’t asked you for this before, Sirius,” Harry said. “But I’d like to have it.”

“What’s that, Harry?” Sirius’s hand lingered on his head, as if he was going to pet Harry the way Harry petted him when he was in dog form.

“I want a kiss.”

Sirius stared at him, his eyes widening more and more into pools of dark, intense grey in the light of the candles they nearly always met by now. Harry waited in patient silence. It was possible that Sirius didn’t think of Harry the way Harry thought of him, but Harry actually doubted that, based on the feeling he remembered Sirius giving him during that vision of the Hunt.

It was much more likely that he just didn’t want to admit it.

“Your mum and dad,” Sirius said. “They wouldn’t like it—”

“They’re dead, and you’re here,” Harry said. “You gave so much for me, Sirius, including your freedom and your life. Or your existence as a human,” he corrected himself, when he saw Sirius open his mouth to explain, again, how he wasn’t exactly a ghost. Harry didn’t want to get caught up and dragged off-track by weird explanations. “They wouldn’t begrudge you this.”

“And you—want it?” Sirius licked his lips, looking between Harry’s mouth and his eyes.

“You don’t know how much I want it. Unless you can take your own wanting as a guide to it.”

Sirius closed his eyes, but he didn’t deny that he wanted Harry, and he didn’t pull away. Harry just waited, snuggled close to Sirius, staring up at him, and a flash of his old childhood musings on Sirius returned to him.

He really is the most handsome man in the world.

Sirius’s hand rose, and his fingers tangled slowly in Harry’s hair. Harry shivered as he felt how tight Sirius’s hand curled. He’d never done that before, even when he messed up Harry’s hair. It was always more casual or faster than this.

Sirius opened his eyes and muttered something that sounded like, “And I’m Death’s Hound,” before he bent his head.

Harry tilted his head further up, and their lips met. Sirius shuddered as though someone had dumped boiling water into his veins. Harry was afraid he would pull back for a second.

But Sirius clasped the back of his head, palm cradling it as if he was holding Harry’s beating heart in his hands. Harry pressed closer, and closer, and tried to show that he would give that up if Sirius wanted it. Whatever Sirius wanted, whatever he needed—

And then the pressure against Harry’s lips melted away, and he opened his eyes to see that Sirius had turned back into his ghostly hound form. Which meant the full moon, outside the castle walls, had set.

Sirius turned and loped through the wall, but not before he gave Harry the look of endless longing that Harry had seen in his own reflection’s eyes whenever he stared into a mirror and thought about Sirius. Which was all the time, because it seemed wrong for his own reflected face to be there by itself. Sirius’s should have been beside it, grinning, healthy and strong.

Harry collapsed back against the wall with a silly smile.

This is going to work. It really is.

*

“Would you go away with the Grim and leave me behind?”

Harry sighed a little as he looked at Luna. They were sitting beside the lake after the Second Task. Harry had come out to watch it because he had thought vaguely that, since the First Task had given him an ingredient he needed, the Second Task might give him one he didn’t know he needed.

But in the end, it hadn’t. And it had been a bit of a disappointment, taking place under the surface of the lake and without a clue what was going on until the surface of the water began to churn and the Champions brought their hostages back.

“Yes,” Harry said. “I’m trying to make sure I can stay here with the Grim instead, but I would go through the gate and give up my life in a second, if that was the only way we could be together.”

Luna bit her lip and looked sad for a second. Then she brightened. “It’s still beautiful.”

“What’s beautiful?”

“That you were my friend. That doesn’t stop being real just because it ends. Like the way my mum didn’t stop being my mum just because she’s dead.”

Harry reached out and entwined his fingers with Luna’s, and she leaned against his shoulder. Harry thought for a second that, if he could, he would find Luna’s mother’s spirit in Death’s realm and bring it back with him.

But he would be lucky for Death to accept his bargain and let him escape with Sirius. Harry couldn’t risk everything he had fought so hard for to please someone else, no matter how close a friend they were or how much Luna missed her mum.

Sirius was all Harry wanted.

*

“I’m concerned about you, Mr. Potter.”

Harry blinked at Professor Flitwick. In the three and a half years he’d been in Ravenclaw, he couldn’t remember the professor ever saying something like that, or even speaking to him except about Charms class and about being a little more social with his peers. Since he hadn’t forced Harry to be social like that, Harry hadn’t really paid him any mind.

Maybe I should now, Harry thought, as he blinked again at the little professor. He was standing in front of his desk, where he had asked Harry to stay after class, and almost wringing his hands. “Why, sir?” Harry asked.

“You spend so much time by yourself, Mr. Potter. And Madam Pince has told me that you’ve been checking out Dark Arts books much too advanced for your age and studies.”

Despite himself, Harry laughed. “If I’d been checking out Dark Arts books at my reading level, would you be concerned, sir?”

Professor Flitwick didn’t smile back. “I hoped we could handle this in the House, Mr. Potter. I know my Ravenclaws get up to all sorts of research projects. But it is increasingly looking like we can’t.”

Sirius materialized beside them, staring intently at Flitwick in a way that made Harry wince. He shook his head at both of them. “It’s nothing that’s going to hurt anything, Professor Flitwick, I promise.”

“Or anyone?”

Harry hesitated, and realized he’d already lost the game not to lie when he saw Flitwick tense slightly. “Maybe me,” he admitted. “But, really, no one else, sir.”

“Harm to yourself is unacceptable, Mr. Potter.” Professor Flitwick looked more tired than Harry had ever seen him. “I did not know that you were actively suicidal.”

“I’m not,” Harry said, lifting his chin up. He was taller than his Head of House, and he tried to use that stand as confidently as he could while he explained. “I think this will work. It has at least a fifty percent chance of working.”

“And you won’t tell me what it is? So I can help?”

Necromancy was illegal in Britain, as Harry had discovered during his first year. He closed his lips stubbornly.

“Mr. Potter,” said Flitwick softly. “If you do not tell me what you are doing, then I am going to have to put you in detention.”

Harry felt sheer desperation welling up in him. He opened his mouth to say something, to complain or yell, he didn’t know which, but then was silenced as Sirius’s ghostly form bounded up in front of him, to stand between him and Flitwick.

“What are you going to do?” Harry breathed.

Flitwick seemed to mistake that as a question for him and started to answer, but Sirius flung his mouth open and gave a great, sudden, silent howl, his head tilted back the way Harry had seen it in the vision of the Hunt Sirius had shown him.

Professor Flitwick blinked and put his hand to his head. “Mr. Potter. What were we talking about?”

Harry swallowed and said, “Ah. You were concerned that some of the books I was getting out of the library were too advanced for me, sir.”

The professor chuckled. “Ah, yes, Madam Pince does sometimes decide that students shouldn’t be reading certain texts and tries to get me to take them out of my eagles’ hands.” He wagged his finger at Harry. “Best to make sure that she doesn’t see you taking them out from now on, don’t you think?”

Harry nodded, hardly able to believe his luck. “Thank you, sir.”

But it wasn’t luck, was it? It was Sirius.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Potter.” Professor Flitwick beamed at him and winked. “And do remember you can come to me for help with your projects! My door is always open.”

Harry stumbled out, in a daze, and reached down to touch Padfoot. He didn’t think he was imagining the slight cool brush of fur against his fingers.

“Wow, Sirius,” he whispered. “What did you do?”

Sirius glanced up at him, and his form seemed to waver and strain, as if he was trying to disappear the way that Tom often did when he was in ghostly form. Then he grew a human mouth where his dog one would be, and spoke aloud.

“I commanded his memories of you to die.”

A second later, Sirius snapped back into his normal dog form, and lay down as if he had exhausted himself. Harry crouched down next to him and arranged his arms as best as he could in a hug. He also ignored a few Slytherin students who walked past and muttered about how mental Harry was to be hugging air.

This was—beyond what Harry had known Sirius could do. Beyond what he had ever expected Sirius to risk for him.

Beyond.

It was the best word to describe everything, Harry decided.

*

“How close do you think you are?”

Tom was hovering at Harry’s shoulder again as he worked on the circle. This time, he was sure that it was almost complete. He had the runes that would open the door to Death’s realm, the candles that would shape his perception of the circle and thus shape the place that waited beyond the door, the dragonfire ash and the grave dirt and other mementoes of being left behind that would anchor his intent, and a piece of both Padfoot’s fur and Sirius’s human skin to point him towards his goal.

“Pretty close, I think.” Harry rose to his feet and stretched. His fifth year had begun with a scramble from all the professors to get them to pay attention to their OWLS, but Harry hadn’t really cared. As if OWLS mattered next to what he was going to do.

If he succeeded, then he would worry about it if Sirius wanted him to. He might want. Harry wasn’t sure.

Is that even something Sirius will care about? Harry wondered, and then shrugged. The full moon was tomorrow—not the one when he would try the ritual, but the one before. He could ask Sirius if he really wanted Harry to concentrate on his studies after Sirius was back among the living.

“Good.”

Tom’s voice was soft and dark. Harry tilted his head towards the circle and smiled. If Tom wanted to think it was a smile of satisfaction at being so close to completing his labors, then let him.

Harry didn’t think he would ever be a genius like the boy who had written that diary full of rituals and come close to succeeding at creating a Horcrux, but when it came to death, he knew a lot of things.

“What’s the biggest missing piece?” Tom asked.

“Finding a way to hold the door open,” Harry said simply. “I know very well how to open it. But to maintain the connection so that Sirius and I can escape after I bargain with Death?” He shook his head. “That’s a hard thing to do.”

He had never said that he didn’t know how to do it. And if Tom missed that, well.

“The sacrifice of a living being is required in the Horcrux ritual.”

Harry nodded. “And so I think that I’ll give up part of my own life to Lady Death. It’s probably going to be required as part of the bargain, anyway. I don’t think she’ll want me living as long as I normally would have.”

Tom eyed him askance. Then again, for a boy who had once risked his very existence for immortality—and failed—the thought of giving up part of his life was probably pretty alien, Harry thought.

For him, it wasn’t. He had wanted nothing more than Sirius since he had first fully understood that the man who visited him on full moon nights and the dog who watched over him from the sidelines were the same person.

And soon, now, he would have what he wanted.

*

“No one was ever like you.”

Harry pressed closer to Sirius. They were in their deserted classroom, not far from the top of the Astronomy Tower. Harry could probably see stars if he tilted his head back, maybe even the Dog Star that Sirius was named for.

“You were,” he breathed into Sirius’s neck. “You gave up your normal human existence and everything else to save me. And I’m going to get you back. To show you that your sacrifice hasn’t gone unappreciated.”

“I never thought it was.” Sirius’s heavy, solid hand, lit by the rays of the full moon shining through a gap between the stones, stroked his hair. “Oh, Harry, I would love you even if you couldn’t do this. Even if it failed. Even if you died.”

Harry smiled at him. That was one reason he really wasn’t afraid of death, aside from the fact that he’d been around Sirius all his life. “I know that. I’ll be with you even if I fail.”

“Running from my jaws in the Hunt.”

“There is nowhere I would rather be,” Harry said, and the fact that he meant it, he knew, was what made Sirius kiss him again.

*

“Goodbye, Luna.”

Luna’s eyes were full of tears as she took Harry’s hand between hers. Harry smiled down at her. Although he was still short, courtesy of the Dursleys’ treatment in his childhood, he was taller than Luna, who stared up at him with shimmering eyes from near his shoulder.

“Are you going to die?” Luna whispered.

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I might. Or I might get Sirius back. It’ll depend on the kind of bargain that Lady Death wants.” Sirius didn’t call her Lady Death most of the time, just Death, but Harry thought it was right to be respectful on the night that would basically involve him breaking into her house.

Luna nodded. It seemed she couldn’t speak. Harry wrapped his arms around her and hugged her, and Luna clung to him with a little sob.

It made him think of the sounds that Sirius had sometimes been able to make even in ghostly hound form, and hold her tighter.

And then, it really was time to go.

*

Harry didn’t have to do some big, complicated chant to open the door. He just laid out the circle in the right order, lit the candles around it, and cast another spell to light the ash and the grave dirt and the old bones on fire.

And as the candlelight and the fire crossed over the circle, Harry stared at the emptiness in the center of the circle and willed.

The air quivered. The door, a glinting, heavy iron-starlight thing, swung open.

Tom attacked him.

Harry smiled, turning into it, having expected it. Tom was too interested in the ritual, in the fact that Harry was going to step through into Death’s realm—the way a Horcrux shard of soul would have to pass through the door. Harry had thought at first that he just wanted to see how Harry would use his notes, but he had also decided, long since, that Tom probably thought he could somehow change the ritual to complete it as a Horcrux sacrifice for himself and win his place among the living back.

As Tom crossed into the circle and became solid, Harry sliding sideways in existence at the same time and becoming the less-mortal form of a ghost, Harry grabbed him and dragged him towards the door.

And braced Tom Riddle’s immortal soul there, sticking it open.

Tom screamed horribly as Harry wove the runes with motions of his hands in the air, the runes that formed the containment circle, the runes that held whatever they wanted. And Harry’s will pressed down on Tom, and crushed him, and held him there, a ghost so stubborn he had survived the backlash of a ritual that should have destroyed him.

It would do.

Harry turned, and stepped into Death’s realm.

*

It blazed, a silvery room full of candles in brilliant candle-holders, the flames flickering and jumping back and forth and creating drifting shadows. But the shadows were in the same patterns as the ones across his ritual circle, and Harry had no trouble deciphering them.

Lady Death was waiting for him.

She had taken the form of a woman with long, smooth white hair, around a face that was like—

Like nothing. Like the dark of the moon.

Harry didn’t try to look at her face. He looked, instead, at the black hound sitting at her feet. Sirius’s eyes were brilliant, and his body was trembling all over, as if he wanted to wag his tail but didn’t quite dare.

“You came to bargain with me, Harry Potter.” Lady Death’s voice was low and distant and howling, the sound of the black hounds howling on the Hunt that Harry had heard.

Harry nodded and still didn’t manage to look up, but he took the Cloak from his pocket. Lady Death stirred, and all the shadows raced around the room once before calming down into the pattern Harry knew, had sung into his soul.

“Ah.”

“I want to give this back,” Harry said. “And I want to give you Tom Riddle’s soul, the bit of it that escaped. From what I read in the notes he gave me, making a Horcrux is something that you take personally.” He actually didn’t know that for sure, was spinning outrageously on a slim guess, but the chuckle that sounded like someone choking was a good indication that he was right.

“Indeed. But three gifts I lost to the world, Harry Potter, and you have returned only one of them to me, plus a soul that might stand in for my lost Stone. Where is the third that stands for the Wand?”

Harry turned, and his will struck out from like a spear. There was love for Sirius, and there was desire, and there was bitter obsession, and there were memories from the days he had spent as a child in the cupboard with only Sirius to make his life bearable, and there was a faint, shredding memory of seeing his mother die.

All of that allowed him to point straight to the shining candle, only a little burned, that bore his own name on the base in letters that slashed through shadow and space.

“Half my own life,” he said. “I want to light Sirius’s candle from mine.”

Sirius stared at him, body tense and shivering. Harry looked down at him, and half-expected Sirius to tell him that he shouldn’t do this, that Sirius didn’t want Harry to die young.

Sirius shivered, and didn’t say it.

“An interesting offer,” Lady Death said, her voice this time like the noiseless hush of waves on a distant shore. “But my hound’s candle is no ordinary one. When you light it—”

Her hands moved, or something close down by her side that might have been her hands moved, and Sirius’s candle hovered abruptly in front of her. Harry choked and stared. He had known that it would look like a candle, because that was the form he had chosen to cast lives in this realm in, but he hadn’t known it would alternate forms constantly, darting back and forth between a stark white candle lit and burning all along the shaft, and a pile of grey ash.

“How do you expect to light his candle from yours?” Lady Death asked softly.

“Full moon nights,” Harry said, and looked at her face while something screeched and ripped bloody claws through his brain. “On full moon nights, he’ll become the hound again, and lead the Hunt. And I will be the Hunt’s prey.”

There was utter silence all around him. Harry stood there, and looked at her, and more and more of him died.

“No necromancer has ever made such an offer,” Lady Death said, and because of the human mode Harry had cast her in, her voice was human enough to hold wonder.

“From what I’ve read about necromancers, they usually don’t love very hard,” Harry said. “I do.”

There was a silence long enough to sting Harry’s soul. But he continued watching Sirius, and the hem of Lady Death’s robe, stirring from the flicker of winds that blew around the candles and the shadows.

Sirius looked at him, and in Sirius’s eyes were the Grim and the man and the Hunt and the road.

“You would have lived ninety years,” Lady Death said abruptly. “You will now live only forty-five. And a third of that has gone by. Is that the bargain you want to make?”

“Your Cloak, and Tom Riddle’s soul, and half my life, and my presence and Sirius’s in the Hunt on every full moon night for the rest of my life, for his freedom as a man in the living world every day and night except the nights of the full moon, until I die,” Harry said. “Yes. I do.”

Sirius gave a single, high whine, and for a moment, Lady Death’s hand fell to rest on his head. Her fingers moved in what might have been a stroke of his ears.

“I accept.”

*

There was a long moment of endless noise. Harry heard Tom Riddle’s soul scream as it disappeared into the endless dark roads of the Hunt, to be pursued and torn apart by the black hounds over and over again. And there was his own screaming as Lady Death ripped away half his life to light Sirius’s candle.

And there was the high, joyous howling that became a cry as they tumbled to the floor.

They were in the chamber that had housed Tom, amid the stones of the scattered rune circle, Harry’s arms wrapped around Sirius, who was lying on his chest, clad in a dark, tattered black robe. It might have been ripped from Lady Death’s robe, for all Harry knew.

Sirius lifted his head and stared around the room. He touched the floor with a trembling hand.

And he wept.

Harry held him still and covered his face with kisses, and Sirius finally stopped crying and began to respond to him. They lay there, holding each other, meeting lip to lip until Sirius drew slowly back.

“It might make me a monster,” he whispered, “that I don’t mind you sacrificing half your life and making us run the Hunt every full moon night. As long as I get to be human again.”

“You enjoyed being her hound,” Harry said quietly. “You enjoyed the Hunt. You dreamed about having me in your teeth someday, when I died. How could I take that away from you? Why would wanting to keep it make you more monstrous than me?”

Sirius stared at him, eyes wide. “Normal people don’t want those things,” he whispered.

“Normal people don’t want to sacrifice someone else’s soul to get their godfather back, either.” Harry shrugged as best as he could when he was still holding Sirius hard enough to give his godfather trouble with breathing. “But I’m not normal. And I’ll enjoy it, Sirius, when you tear me apart. I’ll love everything you ever do to me. I always have.”

Sirius embraced him fiercely, then, and Harry held him back, his chin lying on his godfather’s collarbone. He thought it possible they might have to leave Hogwarts, because no one would understand Sirius suddenly appearing. And come the next full moon, there would be the Hunt, and the road, and the sensation of dying beneath the teeth of hounds.

But Harry had braved the end of the fairy tale, had won his Prince Charming. For the next thirty years, there would be the life he had wanted.

After that…

Why could the Hunt not continue?

Harry lifted his head, and kissed the man he loved, and the shadows laughed in what might have been Lady Death’s voice, mixed with the howl of a hunting hound.

The End.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of From Samhain to the Solstice 2021