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lomonaaerenTitle: A Black Hound at Death’s Right Hand
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Sirius
Content Notes: Fairy tale AU, no Voldemort, canonical child abuse, obsessive Harry, angst, drama, gore, temporary character deaths, necromancy, Dark Arts, past character death.
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 4500
Summary: AU. 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.”
Author’s 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.
A Black Hound at Death’s Right Hand
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.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Sirius
Content Notes: Fairy tale AU, no Voldemort, canonical child abuse, obsessive Harry, angst, drama, gore, temporary character deaths, necromancy, Dark Arts, past character death.
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 4500
Summary: AU. 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.”
Author’s 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.
A Black Hound at Death’s Right Hand
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.
