Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

I want to be upfront about something before this story starts: every terrible thing that happened to me in the next three days was technically my own fault.

I'm not saying this because I enjoy self-flagellation. I'm saying it because someone very wise once told me that the first step toward not making catastrophic decisions is admitting you've made them, and I figure if I'm going to be standing in a forest in the wrong universe with no wand, no magic, and the biological profile of something that should not exist, I should at least be honest about the chain of choices that got me there.

It started with a vision.

Which was, looking back, the first sign that I should have done absolutely nothing.

✦ ✦ ✦

The vision came during my History of Magic O.W.L. — so I was fifteen, under oath of examination silence, in a Great Hall full of my peers scratching quills across parchment while Professor Binns drifted through the supervising desk like the particularly tedious ghost he was. I put my head down on my arms for one moment of rest and found Voldemort on the back of my eyelids instead.

Dark corridor. Black door. The Department of Mysteries, Level Nine of the Ministry of Magic, which I knew from months of dreaming it over and over whether I wanted to or not. The door was open. And through it, Sirius — my godfather, Sirius Black, the only family I had left in the world — was on the stone floor, and someone was hurting him.

I want, in retrospect, to take fifteen-year-old Harry Potter by the shoulders and say: mate, you know that the most dangerous dark wizard in a century has been using your emotional connections against you since you were eleven months old. You know he planted a vision of Arthur Weasley being attacked earlier this year that turned out to be real. You know that the vision could also be a lie crafted specifically to drag you somewhere. You know this. You are aware of this information.

Fifteen-year-old Harry Potter did not care. Sirius was in danger and that was the end of the analysis.

My friends — Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom, Ginny Weasley, and Luna Lovegood — came with me. Because they were that kind of people, and because I asked, and because I didn't fully appreciate at fifteen what it costs to be the kind of person who says yes to the wrong things for the right reasons.

We flew to London on Thestrals. We broke into the Ministry. We found Level Nine through a lift and a phone box entrance and the specific bureaucratic absurdism of a magical government that had chosen to locate its most dangerous research division beneath its public lavatories.

The Department of Mysteries was waiting for us.

Sirius was not.

✦ ✦ ✦

I should describe the Department, because it matters later.

The entrance hall is circular — perfectly, deliberately circular, lined with identical black doors that spin when you enter, so that up and down and which-way-in and which-way-out become theoretical concepts. It is, architecturally speaking, a building designed by someone who thought confusion was a security measure. The Unspeakables who work there presumably spend their first week memorising the number of steps between each door and checking their shoes for scuff marks, because there is no other way to navigate it.

We found the Hall of Prophecy on our third attempt. Row upon row upon row of glowing glass spheres, shelved in the dark on racks that stretched up and away until the ceiling became theoretical, each sphere pulsing with soft silver light and labelled with a tiny handwritten tag. The room had the specific quality of somewhere holding its breath. Our footsteps were too loud. Our voices, when we spoke at all, came out too careful.

I found the one with my name on it. Sphere ninety-seven, if anyone's keeping track. Harry James Potter. The boy the prophecy was about. I picked it up and it sat in my palm, warm and humming faintly, and I thought: so this is the thing. This is what started all of it.

That's when the Death Eaters stepped out of the dark.

Twelve of them. Hooded, masked, wands already drawn, positioned between us and every exit with the practiced ease of people who had been waiting and were comfortable with waiting. Lucius Malfoy's drawl came from the nearest figure — I knew his voice from my second year, from the patronising silk of it in Flourish and Blotts, from his hand on his son's shoulder. He told me, with the specific tone of someone confirming an arrangement, that Voldemort needed the prophecy. That I was the only one who could retrieve it. That he was grateful I'd been so obligingly easy to lure.

Hermione's hand found my arm. Six of us. Twelve of them. Every one of the twelve an adult, trained, experienced, and completely relaxed in a way that said we were not the first children they'd cornered in a dark place.

I raised my wand anyway.

The others raised theirs.

It wasn't bravery, exactly. It was the maths of the situation: we had no good options and several extremely bad ones, and of all the extremely bad options, going down fighting was the one that felt most like us.

Bellatrix Lestrange laughed from somewhere to the left. 'Oh,' she said, 'he gives instructions to the other children as though he thinks of fighting us.' Her voice had a quality like something dragged over gravel, like a laugh that had been in a box for fourteen years and had gone a bit strange in there.

Lucius Malfoy told her to let him handle it. He wanted the prophecy intact. He told me to hand it over, and we'd consider the evening concluded without further unpleasantness.

I said no.

He said yes, actually.

I said we'd smash it.

He explained, patiently, that they could kill my friends one by one and I could watch, unless I'd like to reconsider.

I said — and this is where fifteen-year-old Harry Potter distinguished himself, just briefly, through the specific tactic of keeping six Death Eaters talking while six fifteen-year-olds looked for an exit — I said I had a question. About the prophecy. About what was in it. About why Voldemort wanted it so badly, what it said about us, why he'd tried to get it through Sturgis Podmore and Bode before now. I said it in the tone of someone genuinely curious, which I was, underneath the terror, because I'd spent a year dreaming about that door and never quite known why.

Bellatrix looked outraged at the subject change. Lucius Malfoy looked thoughtful in the way of someone who has been told to negotiate and believes he has time.

He started to explain.

I said: now.

Six wands came up. Six voices shouted Reducto. The Hall of Prophecy exploded.

✦ ✦ ✦

What followed was about twenty minutes of absolute chaos that I'm going to describe in something less than real-time, because real-time would require another three chapters and also I'd rather not relive the specifics of every moment.

The short version: we ran. We fought. We split up, which you're not supposed to do, and we scattered through the Department's rooms because scattered targets are harder to catch all at once and we had nothing else. We were very outmatched and we knew it and we kept going anyway, because the alternative was stopping.

The rooms of the Department of Mysteries are each a study in a different category of the inexplicable. We ran through one full of brains — actual preserved brains floating in a tank, which I recommend not thinking too hard about — and another with a great bell jar full of eternally looping time, a tiny hummingbird trapped inside it flickering between egg and flight and back again. We ran through a room of planets, vast and cold and silent overhead. We ran through a room full of candles suspended in mid-air above a black-surfaced lake, which would have been beautiful in literally any other circumstance.

Hermione went down first. Antonin Dolohov hit her with a slashing curse — not spoken aloud, because he'd already had his voice silenced, and silenced curses from Dolohov were apparently a known hazard because Moody had warned us about him once, not that the warning helped — a streak of something that looked like purple flame across her chest. She made a small sound, almost nothing, and dropped. She was breathing when I reached her. She was unconscious and breathing, which was better than the alternative, but not by enough.

Neville was next to me by then, face a mask of blood from a broken nose courtesy of a Death Eater's elbow. Ron had gone somewhere I couldn't see. Ginny was limping badly, ankle broken, propped up by Luna who looked, as she always looked in a crisis, entirely unperturbed in a way that was either genuine equanimity or a very specific kind of madness.

We found Ron in the brain room. He was upright, which was encouraging. He was also holding a conversation with the air about eleven inches to the left of my head, which was less encouraging. The brains — I had not, up to this point, known that the Department kept preserved brains in a tank, and I feel this is the sort of thing they should put in a leaflet — had gotten hold of him. He had tentacle-marks of dried thought threading up his arms. He was giggling.

'Bwains,' he told me, with great seriousness and two inches of the wrong direction.

I put my arm around him and kept moving.

The Death Eaters were behind us, in front of us, on both sides. Lucius Malfoy's voice kept carrying through the walls: that Harry was the one they needed, the others were expendable, find them and kill them but keep Potter alive. The word expendable landed in my chest like something physical. Hermione in my arms, unconscious. Ron babbling about brains. Ginny's broken ankle. Neville's bloody face.

I carried the prophecy sphere in my left hand the entire time. It was still warm. It was still humming. Whatever Voldemort wanted so badly from it, whatever secret my scar and my dead parents and my entire destroyed life had been pointing toward, was sitting in my palm while I ran.

I thought: if I smash this, they have no reason to take any of us alive.

I thought: if I keep it, Voldemort gets what he wants.

I thought: when this is over, if this is over, I am going to sleep for approximately one year.

Macnair got a hand around my throat in the brain room. He had a grip like iron and he shook me and demanded the sphere and I couldn't breathe. Neville — Neville, who could barely speak through his broken nose, who had never exactly been known for his combat instincts but who had, over the course of this evening, been finding out what he was made of — Neville jabbed Hermione's wand, which he'd been carrying since she went down, directly into Macnair's eye. Macnair released me. I stunned him before he'd finished falling.

We ran for the only door still available.

And fell down the stone steps on the other side of it into the Death Chamber.

✦ ✦ ✦

I'd been in this room before. In a way.

Every dream I'd had about the Department of Mysteries for the better part of a year had stopped at a door — the same door, every time — that I'd never been able to open. I'd stood in front of it a dozen times in my sleep and reached for the handle and woken up with my hand outstretched.

This was what was behind it.

The Death Chamber is a stone amphitheatre, tiered rows of benches descending toward a raised stone dais in the centre. The dais holds an archway — old stone, free-standing, not supporting anything, just standing there in the middle of a room for no architectural reason. Through the arch hangs a veil of black gauze, ragged at the edges, that moves even when the air in the room is completely still.

I had heard voices from behind it, the first time our group had passed through. Not many of us had. Hermione had heard nothing and had looked at the arch the way she looked at divination — politely dismissive, the expression of someone who believes that if something can't be measured it probably doesn't exist. Luna had heard them clearly, clearly enough to identify what they were, and had told me that the people we'd lost were on the other side of it, just behind the curtain. Neville had gone quiet in a way that meant he was hearing something, but hadn't said what.

I'd heard voices. I hadn't wanted to get close to them.

I was thinking about this — in that strange way you think about irrelevant things when you're terrified, when the brain goes looking for something, anything, to anchor to — as the Death Eaters filed down the stone steps into the chamber behind us and formed a loose ring at the base of the dais, wands levelled, blocking every exit, waiting.

Ten of them. Me. Neville.

Lucius Malfoy stood at the head of the arc, and he was smiling.

✦ ✦ ✦

Bellatrix found Neville's name interesting.

She said it twice — Longbottom, Longbottom — with a quality of delighted recognition, the way you say the name of someone you've been looking forward to seeing. She said she'd had the pleasure of meeting his parents. She said it with the particular smile of someone who knows exactly what those words will do to a person and has chosen them for precisely that reason.

Neville's face, already a ruin of dried blood and swelling, went somewhere else entirely. He fought against the Death Eater holding him hard enough that the man shouted for someone to restrain him properly.

Bellatrix said no. She said let's see how long Longbottom lasts before he cracks like his parents. She looked at me as she said it. The implication was clear: give me the prophecy, or watch.

I thought about what she'd done to his parents. Frank and Alice Longbottom, who were alive but hadn't been themselves since before Neville could remember, who sat in a hospital ward and didn't know their own son's face. Who'd been tortured into madness by Bellatrix Lestrange and her husband and his brother, on Voldemort's orders, after the war should have been over.

She cast the Cruciatus Curse on Neville.

He went down.

I moved before I'd finished deciding to move, which was probably why I got as far as I did. I reached Neville — he was still conscious, still fighting it, making sounds I don't want to describe and am not going to — and I got between him and Bellatrix with my wand up and nothing like a plan.

There was a Stunning Spell coming from somewhere that I blocked. Something blew up one of the stone benches in a shower of dust and I ducked. The prophecy was still in my hand. The voices behind the veil were still whispering, closer now, distinct enough that I could almost make out the words.

I thought: there are ten of them and one and a half of us and no way out and we are going to die in the Ministry of Magic on an O.W.L. exam Thursday.

That's when Neville said, 'DUBBLEDORE.'

He couldn't say it correctly. His broken nose had been swelling for twenty minutes and the consonants weren't cooperating. But I looked where he was pointing — up, the entrance to the room, framed in the doorway at the top of the stone steps —

Albus Dumbledore, wand raised, face white with something that on a different man I might have called fury.

✦ ✦ ✦

The Death Eaters scattered.

Not all of them. Not immediately. But the ones who'd already had personal experience with Albus Dumbledore's temper ran first, and the ones who'd only heard about it ran shortly after, and within thirty seconds the Death Chamber had gone from ten wands pointed at us to a general duel of motion and shouted incantations and bodies diving between the stone benches.

Lupin appeared from somewhere behind Dumbledore — Remus Lupin, my former professor, Sirius's friend since they were eleven, looking like he'd run a very long way very fast. Moody. Tonks. Kingsley Shacklebolt. The Order of the Phoenix, responding to whatever message Snape had managed to pass along from my terrible attempt at a coded warning through his classroom doorway.

I remember specific fragments, the way you remember things when everything's moving too fast for narrative:

Sirius barrelling past me toward a Death Eater with his shoulder lowered, shouting something over his shoulder that I couldn't parse through the noise. His face was alive in the specific way it got when he was fighting — not just fighting but fighting beside people he chose, which was different, which was joy underneath the adrenaline. He looked like the photograph in Moody's old order album. He looked like he had all the time in the world.

Lupin pulling me away from a curse that would have caught me across the ribs. 'Get Neville up, get clear —'

Dolohov, revived from earlier, weaving through the benches toward the prophecy sphere still in my hand. Sirius intercepting him before I'd clocked the threat. A flash of red. Dolohov down again.

The prophecy sphere passing from my hand to Neville's — Sirius shouting at us to get out, he'd handle the rest — and then Lucius Malfoy stepping in front of me with his wand levelled and that particular expression of someone who has realised the evening hasn't gone the way he planned and is assigning blame.

Lupin throwing himself between us. 'Go, Harry.'

I grabbed Neville's arm and pulled. His legs were still unsteady from the dancing jinx Dolohov had hit him with earlier, and he stumbled, and I grabbed his robes to pull him upright, and the pocket where he'd tucked the prophecy sphere tore —

The sound of it hitting the stone floor was very small for something so important.

The prophecy shattered. The mist inside it rose and dispersed and spoke into an empty room that wasn't listening, and whatever secret was in it — whatever Voldemort had wanted so badly that he'd been working toward this moment for a year — was gone. Gone into the air of the Death Chamber, heard by no one, worth nothing.

I turned to check we were clear. And saw Neville staring upward, past me, and pointing.

'DUBBLEDORE,' he said again, more clearly this time, and I felt the electric charge of it run through every particle I had. The Death Eaters knew it too. The ones still standing ran.

Except Bellatrix.

✦ ✦ ✦

The rest of the room had gone quiet. Dumbledore had that effect — his presence had a weight to it that changed the air of a space, the way the pressure changes before a storm. The Death Eaters were neutralised, or running, or already restrained by Dumbledore's magic in ways that looked effortless and probably weren't.

Only one pair was still fighting.

Bellatrix Lestrange and Sirius Black. Cousin against cousin. The duel had moved to the open floor near the dais, the arch at Sirius's back, neither of them apparently aware that the rest of the room had stopped. They were completely absorbed in each other the way old rivals get — not just opponents, but something more personal than that, something with a history behind every exchanged curse.

Sirius was laughing.

I want to remember this correctly, because it matters: he was laughing. Not the desperate laugh of someone performing courage. Not the brittle laugh of someone managing fear. He was genuinely delighted — by the duel, by the evening, by being here and fighting and being free enough to fight. He ducked her first curse with the loose-limbed ease of someone having the time of his life. He called out to her — told her she'd have to do better than that, his voice carrying all the way across the chamber in the sudden quiet, echoing off the stone.

Bellatrix's second curse was faster. She put something different into it.

It caught him in the chest.

✦ ✦ ✦

Time went strange.

That's the only way I can describe what happened next. The moment stretched — the way moments do when something is happening that your brain already knows is irrevocable and is trying to slow down against the forward press of it. The laugh hadn't quite left his face. His expression was changing, the laughter still there but his eyes going wide, going somewhere between shock and surprise and something else I couldn't name, the expression of someone who has just discovered that the universe has made a decision they weren't consulted on.

He fell backwards. Slowly — impossibly slowly — in a graceful arc, still facing me, still with that strange look on his face, and the black gauze of the Veil reached up to meet him as he crossed the threshold of the arch, and it wrapped around him like water closing over a dropped stone, and

the Veil settled

and he was gone.

✦ ✦ ✦

I was moving before the understanding arrived. That's the thing about grief at the speed of shock — it hasn't processed yet, it hasn't become the thing it will eventually be, it's just a white noise in the chest and legs that work and a direction. I was at the base of the dais before anyone had moved to stop me.

Lupin's arms closed around me from behind.

Remus Lupin was not a large man in the usual sense. He was wiry, worn-looking, with the tired quality of someone who'd spent decades managing a monthly crisis and saving the energy he had. But he had been a member of the original Order of the Phoenix at twenty years old, and he had been James Potter's friend, and he had the specific strength of someone who had decided not to let go. I fought him. I used both elbows and my full weight and considerably more desperation than technique, and I could not break the grip.

He was saying something. I could hear the words. They were registering somewhere beneath the noise.

He's gone, Harry. He's gone.

I looked at the Veil. It had settled back into its not-quite-stillness, swaying slightly in air that wasn't moving, the ragged hem of it a foot above the stone floor. The whispers were still there — closer than they'd ever been, distinct enough now to almost be words, and one of them had a cadence that I recognised.

I thought: he's just behind it. I thought: he fell through a curtain. I thought: I have heard voices from behind this curtain since the first time I walked into this room, and voices mean people, and people mean alive.

I thought: Sirius has never once kept me waiting. In all the time I'd known him — the handful of letters across three years, the handful of days across two summers, the weeks at Grimmauld Place and the nights at Hogwarts and every moment of the time we'd had — he had never once failed to come when I needed him. Not once.

If he wasn't coming back through the Veil it was because he couldn't.

The understanding arrived.

✦ ✦ ✦

I don't know exactly what happened next in terms of mechanics. I know that I was in Lupin's grip and then I wasn't — whether I did something accidental and wandless, whether grief at that magnitude does something to the restraining capacity of other people's hands, whether he simply wasn't quite prepared for the transition from fighting to something else. His grip slipped. One second.

I had been reaching toward the Veil with my right hand since the moment Sirius fell. My arm was already extended. When the grip released, I was already moving, already leaning, and my fingers found the trailing edge of his robes — Sirius's robes, still moving with the impact of the fall — through the gauze, and I locked on.

I heard Lupin shout.

I heard Bellatrix laugh, high and triumphant, from somewhere behind me.

I heard the voices from the other side of the Veil rise suddenly, all at once, a rushing sound like a wave.

And I went through.

✦ ✦ ✦

Cold.

Not the cold of the Death Chamber, which had been the cold of old stone and recycled underground air. This was cold as a concept — cold as the space between things, cold that had no memory of warmth because it had never needed to consider the question. It was also utterly dark, the kind of dark that isn't the absence of light but the absence of the context in which light would matter.

My hand was still locked around Sirius's wrist. I could feel it — the bones of it, more clearly than I should have been able to, the specific pressure and pulse of someone alive. He wasn't conscious. The limpness in him was complete. But his pulse was there, slow and steady under my fingers, and I held on.

That's when I felt the scar.

Or rather — that's when I felt what the scar had always been doing, and had never noticed because it had been doing it my entire life.

The connection to Voldemort lived at the back of my skull. I'd known it was there since fourth year, when it had started broadcasting his emotions whether I invited them or not — his anger, his impatience, his occasional bursts of cold satisfaction that were the worst ones. I'd spent a year having Snape drill me in Occlumency to try and shut it, and I'd been mediocre at it at best and a disaster at it at worst. It was always there. A door I could never fully close.

In the dark between the Veil and wherever I was going, the door didn't close.

It ceased to exist.

Something tore. I want to be precise about this: not the connection severing, not the door slamming — something being unmade, something that had been built into the architecture of my skull from the moment Tom Riddle's Killing Curse failed to kill me, being extracted by a force that had no interest in leaving any of it behind. Pain, but the wrong shape for pain — moving outward, not inward, as if the hurt was in the thing leaving rather than in the process of leaving. As if whatever had been anchored inside me for fifteen years didn't want to go.

Then it was gone. The back of my skull was empty in a way it had never been. My scar — the lightning bolt, the proof of surviving, the mark that had defined every single year of my life — hurt once, sharply, as if in protest, and then stopped hurting.

It had never stopped hurting before.

Not once in fifteen years.

I had approximately one second to understand what that meant before the darkness released us.

✦ ✦ ✦

We landed.

Right shoulder first, then hip, then skull — the back of my head hit something soft enough not to crack it but solid enough to register. Sirius came down on top of me a half-second later with the weight of a full-grown unconscious man, which is considerable, and which should by any reasonable physical accounting have cracked several ribs.

It didn't.

This was the first sign that something had changed. I filed it under later and focused on the immediate.

Smell arrived before sight or sound — overwhelmingly, with no warning or calibration. Earth. Water. Something green and layered and ancient that had no name in any sense memory I'd ever had, a green so present it was almost audible. Bark wet with rain. Fungus in progressive layers of decomposition going down further than I could track. Animal traces — deer, something corvid overhead, something larger at a distance that I couldn't identify. And underneath all of it, not a smell exactly, something the new version of my senses was reading as a smell: deep, accumulated, living power, the kind that collects in places over centuries and doesn't move.

I opened my eyes.

Trees.

Not British trees. These were something else — trunks wider than the Hogwarts dining tables, ancient and shaggy with moss that ran in green curtains down the bark. Above them, impossibly far above, a canopy so dense that the sky had become something you'd have to take on faith. The light that reached the forest floor came in shafts, thick and golden, falling through the green like light through cathedral glass.

The ground beneath me was soft in the way of places that have been decomposing and rebuilding themselves for a very long time. The air was soaking wet without being rain — suspended, saturated, a permanent state of almost-rain that didn't quite commit.

I was not in the Ministry of Magic.

I was not in Britain.

I was not — and this was the one I needed a moment with — in any version of anywhere I'd expected to end up when I went through a curtain in a Ministry basement.

'Sirius,' I said.

My own voice sounded wrong. Lower. Present in a way I hadn't been present before, as if my voice was occupying the air differently.

He was breathing. I could hear it before I checked — slow, shallow, the specific cadence of unconsciousness rather than the stopped-clock quality of something worse. I found his pulse before I'd consciously directed my fingers toward his wrist, found it with a precision I shouldn't have had, felt it beating slow and steady.

I pushed myself to sitting.

The exhaustion hit me all at once. Not tiredness — something deeper than tiredness, a cellular depletion, as if I'd been running on a reserve that was now empty. My magic — I reached for it the way you reach for a light switch in a familiar dark room, purely by habit — was gone. Completely gone. No resistance, no warmth, nothing. The place where it had always lived felt not empty but absent, as if the circuitry for it had been temporarily disconnected.

I looked at the forest.

The forest looked back.

Somewhere in the process of cataloguing what had just happened to us, the exhaustion caught up with the shock and I lost consciousness.

This is where my part of the story stops, briefly.

What happened next I know only from evidence and from what Sirius eventually told me, sitting in a forest weeks later when we'd both had enough time to put words to it. I'll tell you now, because understanding what came after requires knowing what happened in the hours I was under.

We were found by two vampires.

They were nomadic — a bonded pair, passing through the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, which is where the Veil had deposited us, hunting. They found two unconscious humans in a forest clearing and made the decision you'd expect them to make.

One of them bit Sirius. He was deep into the process before his partner screamed, before whatever was happening fifteen feet away registered as catastrophic enough to interrupt. He left Sirius already dying in the specific way that precedes becoming.

The other vampire bit me.

He was dead in under four seconds.

✦ ✦ ✦

Here is what I understand about what happened, because I've had time to think about it and because Sirius has a gift now that lets him smell the residue of events in a place, and the clearing in the Hoh Rainforest still carries the trace of it if you know where to stand:

The basilisk venom in my blood — quiet, held in equilibrium since I was twelve, kept stable by the phoenix tears that were the only reason I'd survived the Chamber of Secrets — read the vampire's venom as the same category of threat as itself. A foreign corrosive with a delivery mechanism. The basilisk compound had been waiting three years for something to do. It responded the way it was built to respond: with totality.

The exothermic reaction travelled back through the bite. Back up the delivery mechanism, back through the vampire, and the burning started at his mouth and moved inward, and it was over before he understood what was happening. Ash. A scorch mark in the moss that would still be there six months later, if you looked.

His partner saw this from three feet away. He ran. He kept running until he was in Oregon. He told the story to the first vampire he encountered, and the first vampire told the next, and this is how, within three weeks of our arrival in this world, the nomadic network of a species neither of us knew existed had a rumour about a warm-skinned boy in a Pacific Northwest forest whose blood incinerated whatever touched it.

He left behind: the ash of his partner. Sirius Black, already transforming, already lost to the process. And me, with a partially-delivered dose of vampire venom fighting a three-way war inside my bloodstream with two of the most powerful magical compounds in existence.

The phoenix tears refused to let me die.

This is the entire explanation. The venom wanted to rebuild me from the cellular level up. The basilisk component wanted to destroy the venom. The phoenix tears refused to permit any outcome that ended with me not existing. Three systems, at absolute war, for eighty-four hours — I am told I screamed for most of the first forty, which I find instructive about the nature of consciousness and pain.

Sirius woke on the second day. He sat next to me and did not move.

He was hungry. He dealt with it. He came back. He sat down.

That is the most essentially Sirius thing I can tell you about who he was, and who he remained through every transformation: whatever happened to him, whatever he became, he was still the person who sat next to the people he loved and waited.

✦ ✦ ✦

They arrived on the second day.

Sirius heard them from half a mile out — two sets of footfalls that moved wrong, too quick, too light, landing with a precision that said whatever was making them had thought very carefully about where to put its feet. He was between me and the sound of them before he'd decided to move, and he said later that this was the first time he understood that something fundamental had changed: the decision had come after the action, not before, and the body had known what it was doing without being told.

They came out of the trees.

The woman was small. Dark hair, cropped close. Eyes the colour of old amber — golden, warm, not the red of the vampire who'd fled and not whatever colour eyes were supposed to be in this equation. She moved the way a suggestion of movement would move, as if she was navigating by some calculation that had nothing to do with the ground being level. She looked young in the way of someone who had looked young for a very long time and had stopped tracking how long ago that was.

The man behind her was the kind of large that registers as a geographical feature. Dark blond, pale, the same amber eyes, carrying himself with the specific economy of movement of someone who had once been paid to be dangerous and had never quite metabolised that out of their posture. He looked at Sirius with the careful, unhurried assessment of a threat calculation being performed in real time.

The woman looked at the scorch mark. The ash. Sirius. Me.

'He's warmer than he should be,' she said. 'I think that's supposed to be happening.' She paused. 'It's hard to see him clearly. He keeps going blurry — like looking at something through heat shimmer. I can see the edges of him, I can see everything around him, I just can't quite —'

'You think,' said the man, with the tone of someone identifying an unusual level of uncertainty in a source they've learned to trust.

'I know he matters,' she said. 'I know that much.'

Sirius looked at both of them. 'You're the same kind of wrong as me,' he said.

The woman looked at him with an expression that might have been respect. 'Yes.'

'You know what we are, then.'

'We know what you are,' she said. 'We're less certain about him.' She nodded at me. 'He's something we don't have a word for yet.'

'That tracks,' Sirius said. 'He's always been like that.'

The man crouched at the edge of the clearing and examined the scorch mark with the attention of a soldier reading ground evidence. He pressed two fingers into the ash. He considered.

'Whatever did this came from him,' he said.

'Yes,' the woman said.

'It killed a vampire.'

'Apparently.'

'From the inside, based on the dispersal pattern. In under twenty seconds.'

'Fifteen,' Sirius said.

The man looked up at him.

'I have a very good nose now,' Sirius said, by way of explanation.

✦ ✦ ✦

The man stood and said his name was Jasper. The woman's name was Alice. They had come because Alice had seen them coming — not Harry specifically, not clearly, but the shape of the event and a certainty she'd learned not to argue with. They had been travelling. They were, Jasper said, in the process of building something, though he said it the way people say things they're still working out the vocabulary for.

Sirius told them we were from Britain. He told them we had been wizards. He told them, with a brevity that I think deserved some kind of award given the material he was working with, that something had happened to both of us and we were significantly not what we had been, and that whatever was happening inside Harry had been going on for about eighteen hours and showed no signs of stopping.

Jasper listened to all of this with the expression of someone cataloguing information he doesn't yet have a filing system for.

Alice listened with complete attention, and at the end of it said: 'I think you should know that what's happening to him isn't what happened to you. It's taking longer because there are three things fighting over what he becomes. The venom is one of them. The other two are his.'

'Will he be alright?' Sirius said.

Alice was quiet for a moment. The specific quiet of someone looking at something that doesn't quite come into focus.

'I can't see him clearly enough to be certain,' she said. 'But I can see the future around him, and it's there. That's usually a good sign.'

Jasper said: 'We'll stay.'

It wasn't an offer. It was a statement of fact, delivered in the flat register of someone who has run the calculation and is reporting the result.

Sirius looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at Alice. Something in his face — the specific tension that had been there since he woke alone in the forest with no context and a transformed body and me burning beside him — shifted. Not gone. But redistributed.

'Right,' he said. 'Thank you.'

He sat back down next to me and waited.

They settled in. Four creatures in a wet forest in 1948, in a world that didn't have a name for most of them yet.

I woke up, eventually.

But that's the next chapter.