Parting Ways
by Morgan D.

It hadn't worked.

All the trouble they had gone through — crossing the country, hiding from the Order, flying to Hogwarts, hiding from Filch and Dumbledore, gathering the elements, building the Pentagram — had led them nowhere. Or rather, it had led them to a place they could have reached at any given time, with no magical aid, just a few hours away from Little Whinging, either by car or train.

And where there was certainly no veiled archway to take them to Sirius.

Harry picked Crookshanks up from the floor and nestled him in his arms, petting the ginger fur, trying not to think. He had never had a teddy bear or anything of the kind. He had only vague memories of cuddling up to an old, torn pillow as a little kid, when nasty dreams or cruel realities would make his eyes sting. Much clearer was the memory of six-year-old Dudley 'borrowing' said pillow to practice his recently-learnt skills with scissors, and his own decision not to get attached to anything the Dursleys could take away from him.

Hugging the cat, however, proved to be the wrong thing to do right now, as it brought to Harry's mind a question he had been trying to avoid for the last few weeks.

Was that why he had never once hugged his godfather for real? Because he had been trying not to get too attached? So he wouldn't get hurt when the inevitable came to happen? He didn't remember making this decision. He didn't remember purposely keeping his distance from Sirius the way he remembered policing himself not to display signs of preference for any objects in his uncle's house.

Be that as it may, still the name Sirius Black translated into bitter absence to Harry's ears. Twelve years away because of the Ministry's unspeakable injustice. Another year away until Harry could learn the truth about his godfather. Then two more years away because Harry didn't realise how little time they would have and how shamefully he was wasting it. And now a lifetime away, because a ruthless metaphor had been there to have the last laugh.

It had been sort of nice to believe for one day. Believe that there would be a chance for apologies, a chance to make up for the lost time. Harry couldn't bring himself to resent Lupin for this one more disappointment, heartbreaking as it was. The man should probably be feeling just as bad as he did anyway.

Crookshanks' yellow eyes were staring worriedly at him, and Harry tried to reassure him with a faint smile, scratching the cat's neck. He wouldn't start crying now. He had already cried enough, and sobs and tears were useless at any rate. It was time to give up, to accept things as the stinking load of crap they were, and just stop whinging. It was time to let Sirius go.

"Professor? Where's the other parchment?"

Lupin was distracted, looking around them with sad, lost eyes. "What?"

"The parchment with the spell to take us back."

"In my pocket. Why?"

"Because I reckon it's time to use it."

That seemed to bring the werewolf's attention back to the present. "You want to go back? Now?"

"The sooner the better, right? We must be back in Godric's Hollow in time to return the Oakshift... and it's a really long flight. Or should we take the Knight Bus this time? It doesn't really matter if the Order finds us now, does it?"

Lupin was gaping at him, as if not understanding a word his former student was saying.

"Oh, the money!" Harry remembered suddenly. "I don't have enough with me. Well, good thing we ended up in London, isn't it? We can go to Gringotts, then back to Hogwarts to get the Oakshift and the rest of our stuff..."

"You're giving up?" Lupin inquired, his voice sharp with disbelief. "Now? When we're so close?"

"Close to what? There's nothing here!"

"It must be here somewhere. We just have to look for it."

"What must be here? The Deathland Express?"

"The veil, Harry," the older man patiently reminded him. "That's what we came here to find."

"The station is packed with Muggles, Professor. If the veil had materialised in here..."

"It is here. Carved in a brick wall. That's what I saw in the vision."

Harry closed his eyes, taking a deep, exhausted breath. He was done having hopes. There wasn't any more faith in his heart to summon up. "You've had a drug-induced hallucination, Professor. A crazy dream about waves and portals and metaphors... He was your friend and you miss him, and the potions that Snape made you drink..."

"Please, Harry," Lupin hissed, an odd smile on his lips while his eyes darkened with pain. "Do not desert me now. I can't rescue Sirius without you."

"There's nothing either of us can do to rescue Sirius. He's gone."

"The veil is here, I know it is. Why would the Pentagram sortilege have brought us to this place if the veil weren't here?"

"I don't know why it did, but..."

"Fifteen minutes."

Harry frowned. "What?"

"You have trusted me this far. Now I ask you to give me fifteen minutes more of your trust."

"Professor..."

"That's all I'm asking, Harry. We're almost there, I'm sure of it. Only fifteen minutes more, please."

Once again Lupin left to him, a mere teenager, the privilege and the responsibility of deciding their course of action. It had been puzzling in the Room of Requirement, and now it felt even more extraordinary.

And exactly as then, the courteous gesture disarmed the boy's misgivings. "Carved in a brick wall, you said?"

Lupin smiled, grateful. "A narrow wall. With a high baseboard of darker bricks."

Harry glanced around, suppressing a moan. "Lots of brick walls around here. Any idea where we should start looking?"

"There must be a reason why the Pentagram brought us to this spot. Can you see something unfamiliar? Something that doesn't quite belong here?"

"No... Then again, I've never been to this part of the station. Have you?"

"A couple of times, but not recently. I believe these are the suburban platforms; I've used mostly the inter-city ones in the main part of the station."

"I've only used platform nine and three-quarters myself..."

Instinctively, both wizards turned to the glass panel where that big number 10 was painted in blue.

If they were looking for something unfamiliar, they had found it.

"This can't be platform ten," Harry scowled. "I know platform ten, and it's not this one."

"Look!" Lupin pointed to a plastic marker over the train line to their right. "Platform nine."

"But these aren't the ones... These tracks are side by side, and there aren't any barriers between them. Where would platform nine and three-quarters be then?"

With a sudden, hostile growl, Crookshanks jumped from Harry's arms and ran between a jungle of hurried legs, toward one of the exits.

"Wait!" Harry yelled, chasing the cat. The moment he stepped outside the Pentagram, a chilly breeze whipped his skin. Apparently, the magic of the Pentagram produced some kind of heat, keeping away the true temperature of the station, which for some reason was quite cold for that time of the year.

Dreading the thought of having to tell Hermione that he had lost her precious pet, Harry followed Crookshanks to the exit, easily making his way through the crowd. Dimly, he wondered if the time spent running after the cat should be accounted in the fifteen minutes of trust he had tacitly promised Lupin.

So someone had decided to change the numbers of the platforms. Big deal. Maybe they did that on a regular basis, Harry wouldn't know. It didn't mean anything, did it? The owl bringing the book list for his sixth year would also bring a warning that the access to the Hogwarts Express would be at platform seven and two-thirds this year, and that would be it. A bit of a nuisance, nothing more.

To Harry's surprise, the sun had not yet set when he emerged from the train station. After hours confined in the Room of Requirement, he had lost track of time completely; that strange day seemed to have stretched itself into a little eternity.

He descried Crookshanks sitting in front of another entrance to the building, licking his paws. With an impatient groan, Harry looked back to where he had just come from, checking if Lupin had followed them or not. He found the man standing just outside the Pentagram, his head lowered down, his palm pressed against his chest.

Looking like a sick man that should be in bed, resting and being taken care of, and not trailing illusions throughout Britain.

After a moment, Lupin regained his composure and hurried to join Harry outside. "Where's Crookshanks?"

"Right there," Harry pointed, just when the cat decided to go back into the station by that other entrance.

"Come, let's not lose him," Lupin urged.

They chased the cat into the main area of the station, where most of the platforms were. They passed under the gantry, running along the tracks of what was now platform eight, then turning left to where the other tracks were, and where the scenery was much more familiar to Harry.

And also, more familiar to Crookshanks — a highly clever cat, but still just a cat. He was probably looking for the spot where he and his owner had crossed the barrier to catch the train to Hogwarts for the last three years. How would the animal know it wasn't time to go back to school yet?

When Crookshanks made another turn to the left just past what was now platform five, Harry realised he had been only partly right. The cat had indeed led him and Lupin to the very barrier that hid the access to the platform where the Hogwarts Express had awaited the wizard kids on the first of September of the last five years.

On the other hand, the boy had to take back his sceptical opinion about Crookshanks' intelligence, as it was now obvious that the cat knew exactly what they had been searching for: the tattered black veil, hanging from the ancient, cracking archway that was now carved in the brick barrier that separated the tracks.

"Am I hallucinating this?" murmured Lupin, as if scared that the veil would vanish if he spoke too loud.

"No," Harry admitted. "I see it too."

Hope should be erupting inside Harry once again, filling him with joy and excitement at the prospect of getting his godfather back... but...

There it was again. The rippling, abstruse shadow of his nightmares, the pathetic rag that had stolen the one person he thought of as family. In the Death Chamber, the veil had called to him with alluring voices, tempted him with unuttered, incomprehensible promises, and even made him forget for a moment where he was, what he had been doing, what he had been looking for. If it hadn't been for Hermione and the others, he might have forgot everything about Sirius and the dream, might have even crossed the archway himself, obeying its eerie summoning. Now, on the other hand... "I can't hear any voices coming from it."

"You heard voices in the Death Chamber?"

Harry nodded, unable to keep his gaze on the veil. The air in the station was thick with noises of its own, but he was certain that an even heavier silence was all that was coming out with the ethereal breeze ruffling the fabric.

The sight repelled him. This time, he wanted to forget all about Sirius, and run away. He took one step back.

Crookshanks snarled at him.

"Uninviting, isn't it?" Lupin murmured, awe evident in his voice. "I don't think we should expect a red carpet..."

A young woman pulled her trolley from platform four to five, passing right beside the veil, and not giving it a single glance.

"Can't the Muggles see it?" asked Harry, puzzled.

"Can they see us?" Lupin retorted.

"What?"

The werewolf walked to a man who was standing just a few feet away, and waved his hand right in front of the guy's face. Getting no reaction, Lupin chose to scream a "HEY!" right into the man's ear. Nothing.

"I don't understand," Harry whispered.

"Can you feel your heartbeat?"

The boy's eyes widened as he remembered Lupin's posture just a while ago. He imitated the gesture now, pressing his palm against his chest, right over his heart.

Not a sound.

He crouched before Crookshanks, suddenly afraid to touch him, but observing him closely. The cat wasn't breathing.

"When we stepped out of the Pentagram...?" he asked his former teacher.

"You felt a chill through your body? Yes, so did I."

"Blimey..."

"And when you ran after Crookshanks, I saw you walk right through a girl kneeling on the floor to tie her shoes. I don't suppose you noticed her..."

He hadn't. He had more or less noticed that he didn't have to jostle through the crowd or anything like that, but only now he realised that he hadn't really felt anyone touch him except for his travelling companions. The one exception had been the guy with whom he had collided when they had materialised in the train station — when they were still inside the Pentagram's perimeter. Once outside... it was like he had turned into a ghost. "Are we dead?"

"Never born," Lupin corrected him. "At least not here."

Fear invaded Harry's mind, and he couldn't feel his pulse speed up, couldn't feel his breathing grow heavier, couldn't feel his blood throb in his temples. Without the physical symptoms, he wasn't even sure if he recognised the crude emotion as fear. The only place I didn't exist, where no one I've ever seen existed... The only place where the veil will work the way we need it to... "So... this is the right context?" he asked Lupin. "The different metaphor?"

"It should be."

"You said the veil would be a safe passage to where Sirius is. That..." He pointed at the veil. "...doesn't feel safe."

Lupin braced himself to give the archway a sideways glance. "Perhaps 'safe' was a poor word choice from my part."

"But we're going through it anyway..."

"That is why we came here, isn't it?"

Harry gulped, or thought he did, and failed to feel the usual little pain in his throat. His Gryffindor courage wavered. Right now, he would gladly face Voldemort and an entire army of Death Eaters, plus a swarm of dragons and a herd of Blast-Ended Skrewts, if it meant postponing the challenge of the veil for another day. After all, the worst thing those threats could do to him was provide an agonising death.

The dark cloth suggested much more sinister things.

Crookshanks was staring at him with narrowed, intimidating eyes. Lupin simply... waited.

Still crouching on the floor, Harry closed his eyes, wishing badly that he could feel his own breathing. That massive fear was not his, couldn't be his. It clearly came from outside, deeply resembling the compelling power of the Imperius Curse, even if it blew dread into his heart instead of unconcerned happiness. If he could focus on his goal, just as Hermione had helped him to close off the voices in the Death Chamber...

The image came to him immediately, effortlessly: Sirius' broad smile lighting his eyes and pushing the shadows away as Harry assured him that yes, he did want to leave the Dursleys and live with him. "You want to? You mean it?" Sirius had asked then, like a child that had been promised a wonderful present.

Opening his eyes, Harry offered Crookshanks his arm and a lopsided smile. The cat climbed onto the boy's shoulder, and licked his ear.

Lupin took his other hand and helped him stand. "Does it help any if I tell you I'm just as terrified as you are?"

"Not really, Professor."

"All right. Then I won't tell you."

Lupin had not let go of his hand, and Harry squeezed the man's fingers, a comfortable sense of complicity setting between them, shooing away the ghostly fear. Together, they stepped through the veiled archway.

They emerged in a long narrow corridor whose walls were painted in slightly greyish white with blue, horizontal, hair-thin stripes. The low ceiling and even the floor displayed a similar pattern, fooling the eye and making it impossible to tell the actual length of the corridor. The material seemed too soft and pliable to be masonry. The floor actually bent a little bit under their feet, as if made of textile, spread and suspended in the air.

"Did you see this in your vision, Professor?"

"Yes. We should go straight ahead."

"It's not like we have much of a choice, is it?"

Their voices didn't echo, their steps made no sound, their bodies cast no shadows.

It was very unnerving.

"Can we talk?" Harry whispered, stepping a bit closer to Lupin to make sure he would be heard. "Or should we sneak in silently?"

The werewolf took a considerable while to answer. "I don't know."

Perched around Harry's neck, Crookshanks mewed unworriedly every now and then, and the boy couldn't help wondering if he should trust the cat's judgement on that.

The corridor ended abruptly in a circular room. Dreadful memories of the rotating antechamber in the Department of Mysteries filled Harry's mind: this room also opened to dozens of other passages, each one identical to the next. However, unlike that other antechamber, here the passages were not blocked by any doors, and they could see that every one of them took to other corridors that seemed identical to the one they had just crossed.

"I hope you know which way we should go, Professor..."

"Not really," Lupin admitted, examining the many passages with a dispirited expression. "I saw the maze, but only parts of it. I went through one of these corridors, but..."

"The maze?! This is a maze?"

"Not as dangerous as the one you faced in the Triwizard Tournament, I should hope."

"I hate mazes," Harry muttered. "Truly abhor them."

"I'm not very fond of them myself, unless I can see them from above."

"So what do we do?"

Lupin shrugged and grinned. Not at Harry, though, but at the cat sniffing the collar of the boy's tee shirt.

Frowning, Harry held Crookshanks up at arm's length, staring into that weird squashed face, remembering how he had found the animal fumbling in his trunk that morning... remembering the things Lupin had said earlier about the Sorting Hat and other magical things. A pragmatic tool to send us to our fates without the need to offer many explanations...

Hermione had bought Crookshanks in their third year, on a whim. She had gone to the Magical Menagerie to buy an owl to deliver her letters, and came out instead with a distinctly ugly and aggressive cat, although she had never displayed any sign — at least to Harry — of feeling any particular affection for animals. A cat that had immediately labelled old Scabbers as prey, just months after Sirius had escaped from Azkaban to hunt Wormtail. A half-Kneazle cat that recognised Animagi in their animal forms, and whose instinct to spot untrustworthy people rivalled the best Sneakoscope ever built.

A cat with the knack to show up when and where he was needed to be a guide through dark, tortuous paths, to the truths that must be unveiled, and that had already taken Harry and Lupin to the true Sirius once before.

Magic that had been left unquestioned then, and that would be blindly trusted again now.

Harry laid Crookshanks on the floor with unprecedented reverence. He thought about saying something like, "Go, fetch Sirius!" or "Please, show us the way," but kept his mouth shut when he realised how silly, unnecessary and patronising those would sound. Crookshanks deserved better than that.

The cat stayed there, pawing the strange floor and watching the surface sink and swell back to normal as he put his weight on and off his bowed legs. His claws scratched the striped material, which peeled off easily, like layers of old painting.

Minutes passed by, but neither Harry nor Lupin rushed him. They just waited.

And waited.

And waited.

They waited until they had no idea how long they had been standing there.

Only then did Crookshanks feel it was time to proceed. Without warning or hesitation, he moved toward one of the passages and treaded down the chosen corridor, not bothering to look back to see if his companions were still with him.

Lupin turned to Harry with a courteous gesture of "After you," and the two wizards gladly moved to follow the white rabbit into the hole to Wonderland.

This corridor was just as narrow as the first, and impossibly winding. Straight segments didn't last for more than three steps, and a fork would appear at every ten. Crookshanks didn't waste any time to pick their path at those forks; conversely, he didn't seem to be in any hurry, and dictated a very sedate rhythm to their hike. At first Harry had been annoyed at their slow progress, his anxiety and sense of urgency tempting him to run ahead of the cat, but he changed his mind when the first portraits appeared.

They didn't hang from the walls in wooden frames, but seemed to have been drawn directly on the striped surface with crayons and ink. Although vibrant and eye-catching, they were very schematic, deprived of details or texture, and some had a caricature feel about them. The first portrait showed a young freckled face with a long nose and topped by bright red hair. Right under the drawing, someone had written in cute calligraphy, 'Ron Weasley, Harry Potter's best friend.'

The next, about ten feet away, was of a girl with lots of bushy brown hair. The words beneath it said, 'Hermione Granger, Harry Potter's other best friend.' Beside it, smaller letters said, 'shrunken teeth', and an arrow pointed to the girl's mouth.

"I saw these," Lupin commented. "Next thing we should see are the alcoves."

"But what are these?" Harry gasped. Around a corner, they spotted five drawings aligned vertically. The one at the top was little more than a large black stain, but Harry thought he could see a hooded figure in it. The one right below it showed a snake-like face with glaring red eyes sprouting from the back of someone's head. The clean face of a teenage boy appeared in the third drawing, while the fourth displayed a horrendously deformed baby. The one at the bottom had the same snake-like face of the second, but this time with a body of his own. The title, squeezed in tiny letters just above the ground, said, 'Tom Riddle/Lord Voldemort/You-Know-Who/The One Who Must Not Be Named/Lord Thingy, Harry Potter's archenemy'.

"Lord Thingy," Lupin chuckled. "Excellent. I like that one."

"You reckon Fudge would have the guts to call him that to his face?" Harry snorted, pausing in front of the next drawing. Despite the thin features and crooked nose, something in the sketch of Dumbledore reminded Harry of card pictures of Father Christmas. Under the ridiculously long beard, the text said, 'Albus Dumbledore, headmaster at Harry Potter's school'.

"With all his titles, awards, and glorious biography, Dumbledore is registered here as nothing more than the headmaster at my school?" the boy frowned.

And it wasn't just Dumbledore. All the drawings they found next followed the same pattern: 'Rubeus Hagrid, Harry Potter's giant friend', 'Severus Snape, Harry Potter's Potions teacher', 'Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter's school rival', 'Hedwig, Harry Potter's pet owl'...

"My epithet is even longer than Lord Voldemort's," Lupin mused as he gazed at the sketch of a young, tired face framed by greying hair. 'Remus Lupin/Moony, Harry Potter's former teacher of Defence Against the Dark Arts, Harry Potter's father's friend, Harry Potter's godfather's friend and one of the manufacturers of the map Harry Potter uses to wander through Hogwarts'. A salivating wolf had been drawn below it, and an arrow connected the picture with the word 'Werewolf'.

"Blimey, you really weren't kidding when you said this is all about me," said Harry. Everybody he remembered having met in his life seemed to be there, from 'Cornelius Fudge, Minister for Magic during Harry Potter's first five years at Hogwarts', to 'Doris Crockford, witch that shook hands with Harry Potter when he first visited the Leaky Cauldron'.

But there were some conspicuous absences. "There isn't a drawing of Sirius here, Professor."

"No... neither of your parents, or Cedric Diggory."

Indeed, they had already passed a cute but simple sketch of 'Cho Chang, the first girl Harry Potter ever kissed', to Harry's great embarrassment, but Cedric's picture was nowhere to be seen. "You reckon... only the living are drawn here?"

"We've just passed the portrait of Nearly Headless Nick."

"Hmm... Only the living and the ghosts, then?"

"And the poltergeists," added Lupin, pointing at the drawing of 'Peeves, poltergeist that haunts Harry Potter's school'.

"The living, the ghosts, the poltergeists... er... Is that the giant squid?"

"Come on, we don't want to miss our guide."

Crookshanks hadn't paused to watch any of the pictures, not even that of 'Crookshanks, Harry Potter's friend's pet cat'. He treaded on at the same steady, unhurried pace, leading them through the winding maze for many minutes more, until they finally got to the first straight corridor they had seen since the circular room.

"I hope this isn't the place we started," Harry moaned. Everything looked the same, except that the veil wasn't there. What if the archway had simply left and the three of them were stuck in that maze for eternity?

"Is that a crossroad over there?" Lupin asked, squinting ahead.

Only when they were three steps from it did Harry see what the man was talking about. In reality, the seemingly endless corridor opened to a seemingly endless series of crossroads. "We're still in the maze," the boy sighed. "Only now we have right angles instead of curves."

"Thank goodness," said Lupin, "I was getting really dizzy."

"And now you're not?" asked Harry, gazing around dispiritedly. Crookshanks had turned right at the first crossroad; the 'landscape' around them remained unchanged, though.

"Now I'm a tiny bit less dizzy than I was a moment ago."

When they got to the next crossroad, however, they noticed something quite different about it. The corridor to their left opened to a small alcove, where a puppet theatre had been neatly fitted. Several wooden marionettes, about one foot tall and dressed in elegant robes, danced in pairs, while others stood watching at the back. The couple in the centre — a green-robed male and a female in shocking pink — seemed to be operated by an inexperienced puppeteer: the dolls moved awkwardly together, and the male in particular seemed to have rather stiff legs.

"Excellent," Lupin cheered. "We're on the right path."

"Who's holding the strings?" Harry wondered, his gaze following the barely visible wires up until they simply vanished into the ceiling. He leaned his head forward to see better, and was surprised by the sound of mournful music breaking the disquieting silence of the maze. But when he jumped back, startled, the sounds were gone, just as abruptly.

"Did you hear that, Professor?"

"Hear what?"

"The music. I reckon it was the Weird Sisters."

Lupin arched his eyebrows, and leaned his head into the alcove. He smiled and nodded then, and pulled Harry inside by the shoulder.

It was the Weird Sisters. And muffled voices, like a whispering crowd. For some unfathomed reason, they could only be heard inside the alcove.

"I hope you don't mind me saying it, Harry, but I'm afraid you had the misfortune of inheriting your father's dancing... er... skills."

Harry looked at Lupin, uncomprehending. The werewolf indicated the puppet theatre, where the central couple still spun with little grace. A more attentive look showed him that the female marionette had a long plait and dark eyes, while the male had dishevelled black hair, wore glasses and had some kind of mark on the forehead...

Finally, the boy realised why the scene felt so strangely familiar. "That's... that's the Yule Ball!"

"That's what I though," said Lupin. "Parvati Patil was your date? Or is that supposed to be Padma?"

"Parvati," Harry muttered, watching as the female doll led the male into another turn. "Padma went with Ron."

"Right, there they are." Lupin pointed at a red-haired marionette sulking in a corner, accompanied by a female that was, except for the robes, identical to the one in the centre of the stage.

Hermione and Krum, Fleur and Roger Davis, Cedric and Cho, Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson, Neville and Ginny, Dumbledore and Madame Maxime... Everything was just like Harry remembered. Except for the wooden bodies and nylon strings, of course.

"I have seen creepier things in my life," he said with a grimace. "But in a way, this is much more disturbing than acromantulas, basilisks and dragons."

"Come, Harry, we must go," called Lupin, pulling him back to the silent corridor. "Crookshanks might not wait for us."

Thankfully, the cat did wait — although his impatience was obvious. With a moody growl, he stepped over Harry's plimsolls and led them into the next passage.

They found another alcove just one minute later. This time Harry had no trouble recognising the marionette with the scar shaped as a lightning bolt on the forehead. But the identity of the other two in the scene eluded him until he introduced his head in the alcove and heard Stan Shunpike's unmistakable voice saying, "Most of 'em knew it was all over, wiv You-Know-'Oo gone, and they came quiet. But not Sirius Black. I 'eard he thought 'e'd be second-in-command..."

Again Lupin caught Harry's hand and dragged him back to the corridor. "I'm as curious as you are," the man confessed. "But I don't think we should try Crookshanks' patience. Especially since he's the only one here who seems to know where we're going."

"Agreed."

As they rushed past other alcoves, Harry didn't risk more than a glance at the puppet theatres. That was usually enough for him to place the scenes being displayed anyway. The night he helped Lockhart with his fan mail... Talking to the boa constrictor in the zoo... Borrowing an edition of The Quibbler from Luna to read about 'Sirius Black, singing sensation'...

Creepy beyond words. And they went on and on, until Harry had completely lost count of the number of alcoves they had passed by, until he couldn't remember any remarkable event from his life that hadn't been reproduced by the marionettes.

"What's supposed to come next, Professor?"

"Next?"

"You saw the drawings and the alcoves in your vision, right?"

"Right. Now we should get to the wardrobe."

"What kind of wardrobe?"

Crookshanks led them into a last turn to the right and they emerged in the largest chamber Harry had ever been in, seven or eight times larger than the Great Hall at Hogwarts, at least four times taller than the Chamber of Secrets. And the only piece of furniture in the otherwise empty room was right in the centre — dark, large and solid, and yet looking minuscule in the wide, white space.

"That kind," Lupin smiled.

The two wizards approached it with cautious steps, whereas the cat was already sitting before it, sniffing the doors. There were seven of them, and all had identical oval knobs of smooth, glossy ivory, traversed by golden locks. There were no keys in sight.

"This isn't wood," Harry noticed when they were three feet away from the nearest door. "Metal?"

Lupin rested a palm on the smooth surface. "No... Glass, I think." He withdrew his hand quickly, as if burned. "Cold!"

And although the whole structure was of compact black, the glass had become transparent where Lupin had touched it.

"Weird," Harry whispered, trying to peek inside. "There's something... I don't know. It's too dark."

"Try Lumos," Lupin suggested.

"What about the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction..."

The other smirked. "Harry, I seriously doubt the Ministry will pick up your magic here, wherever here is."

Fishing his wand from his pocket, the boy swiftly cast the spell, and brought the now luminescent tip near the hand-shaped mark in the glass. The light didn't penetrate far, but the object he had seen was very close to the surface. "It's just clothes," he told Lupin, disappointed.

"How ordinary..." The werewolf was bravely rubbing his palm on the icy glass to form a larger area of transparency. In his other hand, his own wand also had a lit tip. "Too ordinary. Look again."

Harry did. It was indeed a wizard's robe, somewhat out-of-date from what little he understood of fashion in the wizarding world, but in good condition. It hung from an ivory hanger whose hook coiled around the rail in a tight spiral.

And it had a person inside it. Not a marionette, but a real person, eyes closed as if in sleep. A young man with light skin, unruly black hair and wearing glasses...

"It's me," Harry sighed, marvelling at the realisation that, after all he had seen since activating the Pentagram, finding a clone of himself hanging unconscious from a hanger in a glass wardrobe did not surprise him at all. "It's all about me."

"Actually, that's James," Lupin whispered, bringing his wand closer to the young man's face. "Merlin, you are the spitting image of your father."

Harry bit his lip hard, and longed for the little pain that had always followed such gesture. The bright glow of the wands bathed the familiar features, and he finally noticed the unfamiliar lines on it, the longer nose, the unblemished forehead... "Dad? But... what... why?"

Lupin changed the angle of his wand, revealing a second figure at James' left. Harry tried to use the hem of his tee shirt to 'clean' the black glass, but apparently only the contact with naked skin did the trick. Flinching at the biting cold of the material, he opened a transparent area around the spot Lupin's wand was pointing to.

Harry recognised the lovely face framed by red hair immediately. "Mum."

"We are but chessmen," Lupin murmured reverently, like a prayer. "Destined, it is plain, that great chess-player, Heaven, to entertain... It moves us on life's chess-board to and fro, and then in death's dark box shuts up again."

The words made little sense to Harry, and right now he couldn't bring himself to worry about them. His parents! Not names carved on graves. Not illusions behind a mirror, not silent smiles in old photographs, not echoes coming out from a wand, not memories stored in a stone basin. His parents, the real thing.

Why did it feel so unreal, then?

The boy tentatively touched one of the doorknobs; the ivory was mercifully warm. Then again, that was all the doorknob was willing to be merciful about. "It's locked."

Lupin didn't seem to have heard him. He had his arms wrapped around himself, his eyes fixed on James' face. "So this is it..."

"This is what?" snapped Harry. "So this is the place we go when we die? A bloody wardrobe?"

"Carefully stored while not in use," the older man muttered. Then he exorcised whatever bleak thoughts had occupied his mind with a sharp shake of his head. "I suppose it could be worse."

"Worse?!" The boy had thought he had grown accustomed to the eerie surrealism of the situation, but this was just too much. Those were his parents! Or at least their souls or spirits, if it was truth that their bodies were buried at McKenna Cemetery. Honoured and revered in one world, put away like broken toys in this one...

"I'm sorry, Harry. It's just that... Don't you see?" Lupin opened his arms to indicate the wardrobe. "We're here."

Harry gazed at the glass structure and gritted his teeth. "You reckon Sirius is in there too?"

Lupin only smiled.

The next moment, both were rubbing their palms on the wardrobe's broad doors, painting the glass clear in search of the man they had come for. Crookshanks' help was limited to one light brush of his nose against the door, after which he decided, with a resentful mew, to leave the task to his companions while he nursed his frozen whiskers.

"Why is it that I can't feel a thing, not even myself pinching my arm, but still this glass hurts like I'm holding ice?" Harry moaned.

"Because the fates have a twisted sense of humour," the werewolf muttered.

"I thought you'd have a magical explanation for it."

"I've just given you one."

"Ouch, look!" Harry grimaced. "Professor Quirrell."

Harry's first teacher of Defence Against the Dark Arts hung from the rail at Lily Potter's left. His body seemed to be in one piece. The ominous turban was nowhere to be seen, and from what Harry could see of the back of his bald head, neither was Voldemort.

"Oh dear, Bertha..." Lupin mumbled. "I knew her from school..."

Three doors away from Quirrell, Harry saw a plump woman he recognised as an older version of the girl he had once seen in Dumbledore's Pensieve.

The next person they found was an old man.

"Who is this?" asked Lupin.

"I don't kno... Wait. I think I..." Harry frowned in concentration. "I saw him in a dream, one of those that made my scar hurt. Voldemort killed him."

The werewolf nodded grimly, and both returned to the task of scrubbing the glass.

Right beside the old man, they found Bartemius Crouch, once head of the Department of International Magical Co-operation. His face was bruised and unshaven, his clothes were torn and filthy — exactly how Harry had seen him the night he died, murdered by his own son. Harry felt sorry for him for a moment... until he remembered who had sent Sirius to prison without a trial. Lupin himself acknowledged Crouch's presence inside the wardrobe with nothing but a barely audible snort.

Finding Cedric Diggory suspended lifelessly on a hanger by the collar of his robes was, against all odds, much easier on Harry's nerves than he would have anticipated. Maybe it was the eyes. In his nightmares, Cedric always stared at him with that same look the Avada Kedavra curse had stamped on his face forever. Now his eyes were closed, his features serene.

"I don't think I've met this one either," said Lupin, squeezing his eyes to see through another glass door.

"Broderick Bode. He was an Unspeakable. Voldemort had him killed."

"So you knew him?"

"I saw him in the World Cup, then in the Ministry the day of my hearing, and in St Mungo's when..." Something clicked in Harry's mind. "Whoa... This isn't where dead people go. This is where people I know go when they die!"

Lupin didn't answer, and Harry had the distinct impression that his former teacher had realised that right from the start.

It was a really large wardrobe. And although Harry had seen more death than the average teenager of his class, he was sure all the dead people he had been acquainted to couldn't possibly fill that space. Did that mean...

"I've found him!" Lupin shouted, forgetting the cold to energetically scrub the glass with the reddening skin of his hand. Crookshanks let out a woeful mew.

In a way, the vision of Sirius in the Mirror of Erised had been more real than this. He looked precisely like Harry had last seen him: the same clothes, the same precocious age lines tarnishing the handsome face partly hidden by a curtain of black hair. This was the Sirius he had known, the shadow of the man he had been once and whose laughter survived only in the Potters' wedding photograph. But still...

"I remember a time when I believed he was invincible."

The croaked murmur sounded so intimate that for a split second Harry thought it had come from his own lips. But when he turned to Lupin, he found the threat of a tear gleaming in the corner of the man's eye as he stared at his old friend's face.

"I saw James in the casket, before they buried him," said Lupin, his hand clenching in fists. "Just like this... It's just wrong. Those two were larger than life. And when Sirius came back from Azkaban... from hell on earth..."

"He was immortal," Harry whispered, his own feelings coming to light now. "So how this... can be him?"

"It can't." Lupin closed his eyes, and brushed trembling fingers through his grey hair. "But it is. That's our Sirius, Harry. Broken, dead and discarded. And now we take him home."

Harry fervently wished he could hear his heart speeding up in fear and excitement now. "Just Sirius? Can't we take my mum and dad too? And Cedric?" He felt somewhat guilty about leaving the others behind — well, not about Quirrell or Crouch — but he already had trouble picturing how a skinny boy and a sick, exhausted man would manage to take even one of them... Or maybe they would all wake up once out of the wardrobe?

"I don't know, Harry," said Lupin, examining the doors' locks. "I want to, more than you can possibly imagine. But Sirius was the only one in my vision. Remember what I told you about fates' sense of humour? How typical it would be if, after coming this far, we were condemned to return empty-handed because we dared to ask for too much..."

"But we can't just leave them here," the boy protested. "Sirius wouldn't want that either."

Lupin noticeably balked at that. "Let's deal with one problem at a time, all right? We won't be able to take anyone if we don't figure out how to open this wardrobe."

Harry turned his attention to the doors. James, Lily and Quirrell were behind the one farthest to the left. The next two doors guarded nothing but empty space. Bertha Jorkins, Crouch, Cedric and the old man had been stored together behind the central door, while the one after that held Sirius and Bode. The two remaining doors maintained their dark, opaque black, since Harry and Lupin had stopped scrubbing the glass after finding Sirius.

Harry tried pulling the doorknob nearest to his godfather's body, to no avail. Pulled again, with a bit more strength. Still nothing. Lupin gave it a try, with no better luck. They tried all seven doors, and none acquiesced to open. Harry wondered if this would be like one of those videogames his classmates at elementary school had talked about, in which the players would often get to doors or treasure chests that wouldn't open, forcing them to face a new, more hazardous adventure just to find the key.

Ah, but they were wizards, weren't they? "Alohomora!" cast Harry, with the proper waving of his wand at the lock of Sirius' door.

The wardrobe stoically declined to open.

"What now?" he asked Lupin.

"Well... According to Filius Flitwick, there are two-hundred and eighty-three Unlocking Spells registered in the entire world, plus many more — from small wizarding communities — that never made it to the books."

"Two-hundred and eighty-three?!" Harry moaned. "Do you know all of them?"

Lupin pressed his lips into a thin line. "I've learnt about three dozen Unlocking Spells throughout my life, and we'll be lucky if I remember half of them." Raising his wand to draw a rhombus in the air around the knob, he chanted, "Foris Patefactum."

Nothing.

Tapping the lock three times, and lowering his voice to a deep growl, "Nsaakwanan."

Nothing.

Holding the wand perpendicularly to the lock and moving the stretched arm in a large circle, "Ireki Bide."

Nothing.

Twirling the wand five times around the index and medium finger before letting the tip touch the knob, "Digor Dor."

No, nothing.

Harry had a sudden inspiration. "Open," he said, and judging by Lupin's stunned expression and Crookshanks' fretful hiss, he had managed to utter the word in Parseltongue. But that didn't work either.

"It worked on the doors to the Chamber of Secrets," Harry shrugged defensively.

Lupin dismissed the apology. "Don't hesitate to mention any other ideas you might have."

But Harry didn't really have any, and sat on the floor beside Crookshanks, petting the cat's neck. The werewolf persisted, for what felt like hours. Sometimes he paused, rubbing the bridge of his nose, trying to recall spells he probably hadn't used for years, if ever. Some of the spells required such complex wand-brandishing that Harry doubted he would ever be able to perform; some dispensed with the wand altogether. He failed to identify most of the languages coming from Lupin's mouth. A few of them didn't even sound human. "Puvri Pòt. Ticht Doar. Baqa' Dal. Fffsrigah. Athrop Vrei."

The wardrobe remained insensitive to the werewolf's efforts.

Eventually, Lupin ran out of spells. His patience seemed to be running thin as well, not to mention his stamina. "Ruddy lock," he panted. "Ruddy Firenze and his hallucinogens. Why couldn't the vision show me how to blast this stupid door open?"

"Maybe a spell to literally blast the door?" the boy suggested.

"Without hurting Sirius?"

"You think he can get hurt? I mean, you said my parents' bodies were buried, so these can only be their souls or something like that..."

"Except that Sirius' body vanished with him when he went through the veil," Lupin reminded him. "And who says souls can't get hurt anyway? What do we truly know about the laws of Physics in this place?"

"Good point," Harry conceded bitterly.

"Besides, I have the feeling we won't be alone around here for much longer," said the man in a lower tone.

Harry looked around the vast room with apprehension. "You reckon someone lives here?"

"All this — the drawings, the marionettes, this wardrobe —, they must belong to someone. And there's a considerable chance that said someone will not appreciate our presence here, let alone blasting their property."

"Sirius belongs to himself! Belongs with us! Has this someone asked Sirius if he wanted to come here and dangle from a bloody hook for eternity?" Harry got on his feet and socked the door that separated him from his godfather. "You said it yourself, Professor, we can't give up now. Not when we're this close to making things right again."

The glass reverberated in gloomy, spine-chilling harmonics in the silence that followed. Lupin waited for it to die out before replying. "We are not giving up. And I solemnly swear to you: Sirius goes with us, no matter what it takes. But this will be hard enough to accomplish if we don't lose our minds and start blowing things up. Let's think of discreet solutions first, and then we progressively move to more destructive measures, okay?"

Harry nodded, trying to swallow his growing anxiety. "So what do we do?"

"Hmm... you wouldn't know how to a pick a lock, would you?"

"Er... actually, I do." The boy knelt on the floor to take a close look at the lock, berating himself for not having thought of it before. Was he getting so used to magic that simple, Muggle-style solutions wouldn't even occur to him any more?

"Sirius tried to teach me how," Lupin sighed, his eyes lingering regretfully on his friend's face. "Several times. I never wanted to learn."

"George and Fred taught me. The Dursleys used to lock my school trunk in a cupboard during the summer, which made it a little hard for me to do my homework..."

"You learned to pick a lock so you could do your homework? That's an interesting excuse..."

It looked like a normal, unmagical lock, the kind the twins had shown him how to open with a normal, unmagical hairpin. He didn't have a hairpin with him, and suspected Lupin wouldn't have one either. Fortunately, Harry was wearing one of Dudley's old trousers, which required not only a belt but also a handful of safety pins to keep it in place.

"Can I help in any way?" asked Lupin. "Need more light?"

"No, it's fine," said Harry, introducing the spiked ends of two safety pins in the lock. "I just need to... uh..."

"What?"

"...think of another way to open these doors." He took the pins out and showed them to Lupin. Their ends were covered in rust, literally disintegrating on Harry's palm.

"Unbelievable," said Lupin between gritted teeth. "Unbelievable. There's got to be a way."

"What if we try to break the glass here?" Harry pointed at one of the doors with no one behind. "Then we don't run the risk of hurting any of them."

"I believe you've already moved into destructive measures, Harry," the older man smirked.

"Maybe if we put our clothes in front of the glass we might muffle the sound a bit?"

Lupin examined the area the boy was pointing to, measuring its distance to the people inside. "I suppose it's worth a try..."

"This won't accomplish anything," said a familiar voice at their backs.

Harry froze. He sensed more than saw Lupin flinching beside him and Crookshanks hissing menacingly at their feet. The affable, low voice that had so often quieted his fears was here now to rouse them.

Boy and werewolf turned slowly, exchanging a quick troubled glance between them before facing the commiserating smile on the face of Albus Dumbledore.

It just had to be him, Harry mused. His was the presence they had been hiding from since the beginning, his was the power they feared the most. Friend and alchemy partner of Nicolas Flamel, and the one who had convinced Flamel to give his Philosopher's Stone up and die, because that would be 'all for the best'. The one who looked down at the world from the top of his celebrated wisdom and felt he had the right to judge Sirius' actions and character, to lock people up against their wishes, to pity and yet not help, to decide what was good and what was bad. The master of manipulation. It couldn't have been anyone else.

"You must realise that taking Sirius from here won't really bring him back to life," said the Headmaster. "That cannot be done."

Harry frowned, looking at Lupin out of the corner of the eye. The vision he had described had been accurate so far, it had guided them to Sirius like he had promised. Could it be that all their efforts would still be in vain?

"What cannot be done?" asked Lupin. "Taking him from here or bringing him back to life?"

"Taking him is possible," Dumbledore granted, "if you are really determined to do it. You must know that, since you are here. But you also must know that it won't change anything."

"We have to try!" Harry retorted. "Even if it is impossible, we have to try." Sirius would have, for him. Harry had no doubt of that.

Dumbledore stepped closer to him, wrapping him in a rather parental look. "Don't you think that decision might be a little selfish?"

"Selfish?!"

"You want him back. Granted, it's likely that he too would like to go back. But have you stopped to consider how this would affect other lives and events?"

"We're not hurting anyone!" Once the words were out, Harry realised he wasn't all that sure of that. "Are we?" he whispered to Lupin.

"No, we're not," the werewolf assured him, his eyes still on Dumbledore. "Nothing we do here will change anything that already is."

"If you accept that, then accept your limitations," the Headmaster admonished, his hands disappearing among the folds of his reddish-purple robes. "You are disputing one of the most profound laws of nature. Some things are irreversible, no matter how much we dream and pray. Magic can heal you and prolong your time on earth. But no power can return you to life once you are properly dead."

"Properly dead?!" Harry snapped. "Sirius fell through a veil! You call that a proper death?"

"I believe you know by now what the veil means, Harry."

"Yeah, yeah, a metaphor," the boy rolled his eyes. "That's just brilliant. Does this mean that from now on everybody that buys a farm, bites a biscuit or feeds the fishes will just drop dead in the next second? How do I even know he is truly dead?"

"I told you he is," said Dumbledore.

Lupin frowned at that.

"Should I believe you?" Harry asked.

"Yes," the Headmaster nodded.

"Why?"

"Because I'm telling you."

Harry couldn't believe his ears. "And I should accept that and give up on him just because you're telling me so?"

"Have I ever lied to you?"

"Have you ever told me the truth?"

Crookshanks was pacing around Dumbledore, snarling at the old man's feet.

"Harry, Harry..." Dumbledore said in a benevolent tone. "You are still very young... I realise how frustrating it must be to you. It is never easy to witness such a doleful event as the death of a beloved one, having to acknowledge our ignorance about the purpose of things. But not comprehending doesn't mean it is not there..."

The boy gritted his teeth. "What could possibly be the purpose of Sirius dying like that? After all he went through? Without ever getting the chance to clear his name?"

"I can't answer that question now."

Lupin arched an eyebrow. "But is there a purpose?"

"Perhaps," Dumbledore sighed. "Perhaps not. Soon you will find out."

"How soon?" the werewolf insisted.

"Time is relative. Sometimes years pass by between June and July."

"That's not a great incentive to convince us to wait," Lupin pointed out. "By the way... why are you pretending to be Albus Dumbledore?"

Harry gaped, looking back and forth between the two older wizards. That person wasn't...?

"At first I thought you were simply wearing his face so we wouldn't know what you look like," Lupin went on. "But then you started on the things you have told Harry..."

"Oh..." An uncharacteristic blush appeared on Dumbledore's face. "Force of habit. It's quite enjoyable to be Dumbledore. He often speaks for me."

Quite abruptly, the colours of the Headmaster's clothes, skin, hair and beard liquefied, forming pools of different shades that rushed to other points of his silhouette, merging together to form other hues. His shape shifted in the same fluid metamorphosis, enlarging here, shortening there, blurring, swirling and reforming, eventually coalescing into a completely different being.

For starters, it was a woman. Dark red hair, down to her shoulders, framed a pearly white face of long nose, high cheeks and blue almond-shaped eyes. She was a head taller than Harry, but her slender neck and arms gave her a look of ethereal fragility. Her clothes were made of liquid pastels — yellow, blue, red and green — that kept chasing one another around her lean body.

Crookshanks stopped growling, and sat a few feet away from the transformed figure, keeping a wary eye on her.

Disturbed, Harry glanced quickly at the wardrobe behind him. The colour of the eyes and the hairstyle were different, the general shape was a bit off too... and yet that being held considerable resemblance to Lily Potter. "Who are you?"

"I'm the one who draws the pictures in the maze, the one who holds the strings of the marionettes. And yeah, the wardrobe is mine too. I keep them there when they've fulfilled their purpose." The words were confident and intimidating; the tone was casual and somewhat jovial. "Let's say I'm the one you've always cursed when you complained about divine mysteries and the injustice of your world."

"No person should have that kind of power over others," Harry grunted.

"I don't know about that," she shrugged. "Besides, I am not exactly a person, am I?"

Harry's eyes widened. "So you... you're the power behind fate?"

"Me? Oh, no. Not yours, anyway," she smirked. "Or I wouldn't have let you in here."

"Source," Lupin whispered reverently.

She studied the man with interest. "All right. You can call me that. You're somewhat different from what I had imagined, by the way."

Lupin grinned, unworried. "I don't doubt it."

"Interesting," Source nodded, gazing at Lupin, Harry and Crookshanks like an art dealer studying sculptures. "A bit unnerving too. Good grief, who dressed you in these awful colours?"

"Uh, excuse me?" said Harry, annoyed at her scrutiny. "You're Source? Of what?"

"Well, everything!" she said, as if Harry's had been the dumbest question ever. "Everything you know, everyone you know, including yourselves... Well, not these, never." She pointed at their clothes. "And I'm surely not to be blamed for this," she snorted, raising Lupin's hand to check the bandage in his wrist. The sleeve slid to the elbow, uncovering the mark of the Oakshaft leasing pact. "And what in the name of Nesbit is this? My dear, you are in the hands of some cruel, horrible fate..."

"More cruel and horrible than dangling from a hanger in a frigging wardrobe?" asked Harry.

"Hey, I take good care of them," Source countered. "Just because I've put them out of service, it doesn't mean I don't like them."

"About that," Lupin intervened. "We'd like to discuss with you the possibility of getting Sirius Black back in service."

Harry eyed his former teacher with apprehension. Not only he had restricted the discussion to Sirius — if he planned to bargain with Source, he probably should have started asking for all of them to later decrease the demand to three or four people —, but his phrasing implied a request of her permission. What happened to "Sirius goes with us, no matter what it takes"?

"That person is dead," said Source. "It is definitive. There are rules and parameters that cannot be broken."

"So this was all for nothing?" Harry mumbled. "We'll never see Sirius alive again?"

She hesitated before saying, "I couldn't possibly answer that for fear of incriminating myself."

"You say that you can't break the rules," said Lupin. "But it seems to me that you are the one who makes them."

Source twitched her lips, giving Lupin a vexed glare. "Okay, fine, so I am. So I could bring those people back to life; I have that power. But I didn't make those rules just because I was in the mood for it. They're necessary. The integrity of your entire world is affected when those rules are broken and... well, it's not pretty, okay? I've been having enough trouble with that as it is. So I'm sorry if you don't like my decision, but a much bigger mess might engulf us all if I take it back. What's done is done. It cannot be changed."

The memory of Lupin's enigmatic words just before they left Godric's Hollow blew hope into Harry's heart. "We're... we're not trying to change things," he said. "We're just taking things... someplace else. To rebuild them." Or at least that was what Lupin had told him. If the boy was going to be honest with himself, he still had absolutely no idea of what that meant, or how they were going to do it.

Source arched an eyebrow, suspicious. "And that's all you want?"

Harry opened his mouth to mention his parents and Cedric, but Lupin cut him off. "That's all we're supposed to do."

She stared hard at Lupin, then at Harry, then down at Crookshanks. She folded her arms, her right foot tapping the floor. "Don't like the way I do things, do you? Think you can do it better?"

Crookshanks mewed.

Source stuck her tongue at him. "Sure, you would think so."

Harry sent Lupin a bewildered look, but the werewolf only shrugged, just as perplexed.

"Fine," said Source with a theatrical sigh. "If you've only come to borrow my stuff..."

"Your stuff?" Harry echoed, throwing another glance at the people on the hangers.

"Usually, I don't mind," she said. "It's flattering, in a way. But it's very unusual for messengers to be sent here for this task. Most others come themselves and simply take whatever they want."

"I suppose we like being unusual," Lupin grinned.

"Wait..." said Harry, afraid to risk a hopeful smile. "You said you don't mind? You mean we can take Sirius with us? You won't try to stop us?"

"Here and now... no, I won't stop you," she said. "Don't expect me to make any promises though."

His parents... The question was burning on the tip of his tongue. Could he save his parents too? They were right there, a few hangers away from Sirius... And didn't Cedric deserve a second chance too? They were all dead because of him...

But Source might find him too greedy for asking. She might get angry. She might shoo them off without freeing Sirius. Harry turned to Lupin, wondering if he was considering the same possibility.

"You are very kind," Lupin told her, bowing his head courteously. "This means a lot to us."

Source took Harry's face in her long hands, her dark blue eyes beaming as she looked at him. "They'd better take good care of you," she murmured. "You are the most precious thing to me." She kissed his forehead, right on the lightning-shaped scar, and turned to leave.

"Er... Excuse me?" Lupin called.

She paused. "Yes?"

"How do we open the wardrobe?"

Source seemed startled at that, and gave the werewolf a partly amused, partly reproachful look. "That is your problem, not mine." With that, she turned her back to them again.

Harry watched her glide away in panic. They had already tried everything short from destroying the doors, and that didn't seem like a good idea now that its owner had given them permission — sort of — to take Sirius with them. He turned to Lupin to ask what they would do now...

...but the question died in his throat. Lupin's face was almost unrecognisable. His jaw hardened and his eyes glinted strangely, fighting the shadows falling over his features. Despite the tired air and the shabby, odd-looking clothes, his presence now irradiated a feel of power that Harry had only seen in him once: the night in the Shrieking Shack two years before, when he had stepped in to stop Harry from killing Sirius and meet his old school friend face-to-face after more than a decade apart.

Holding two of the wardrobe's knobs for support, the man kicked one of the still dark-glassed doors with all his strength.

The glass vibrated, emitting a screeching sound, but it did not crack.

"HEY!"

Harry spun on his heels and found Source glaring at Lupin, her arms akimbo.

All Lupin did was kick the door again.

"What do you think you're doing?" Source protested. "You can't go around breaking my furniture!"

The werewolf paid her no mind and hit the glass with a third kick.

For Harry it was quite a shock to see his former teacher, always so urbane and good-natured, display manners that most people would describe as... well... rather rude. Harry wanted to kick those doors until they shattered into dust, but that was not how Professor Lupin was supposed to behave, was it?

"Stop that this instant!" Source was shrieking. "How dare you...?"

Lupin finally looked up at her. His voice was polite, velvety, constrained.

His eyes were the wolf's.

"I mean no offence. But I have fourteen years of unsolved issues to settle with this man." His fingernails scratched the glass like claws. "You must have imagined me very differently indeed, if you thought I would renounce the chance I was miraculously given to set things right with him."

Source folded her arms over her chest, once again staring at Lupin with scrutinising eyes.

"And this boy," Lupin gestured to indicate Harry, "needs a parent. My friend was taken away before he could even try to fill that role. Surely you don't want to see Harry suffer any more than he already has."

"I'm sorry, but life isn't all about pleasantness and bliss," she retorted. "That is something Harry needs to learn. He's growing up, he must learn to stand on his own..."

"I do realise that life is unfair," Lupin whispered, his tone growing sharper as it receded in volume. "But there is unfairness... and there is cruelty."

"Cruelty?" Source gasped. "You just don't understand... you don't comprehend..." She rested her blue emotional eyes on Harry. "Pain is not the end, it's the means. I wish you didn't have to go through this. I never wanted for you to cry. I was in tears myself when I stored him in the wardrobe, I knew what it would mean to you..."

"Then help us!" Harry begged.

"I can't do that!"

"Why?!"

"Because I need him where he is," she drawled, as if talking to a very young child.

"Hanging inside that wardrobe?"

"Exactly. Otherwise, it's going to be a mess."

Harry fought to keep his patience. "A minute ago you said we could take him with us. Now you're saying he has to stay. Which is it?"

"Me letting him out of the wardrobe would be a completely different metaphor," she replied, scandalised at his ignorance of such matters. "We have to be very careful with these things. Imagine if it were a closet instead of a wardrobe..."

With an unintelligible grunt, Lupin kicked the glass once more.

"Look, this is your fault for subverting things, all right?" Source raised her hands in a defensive gesture. "I told you, the others just come and take whatever they want. Simple and easy. It's not my fault if your lot decided to make a big deal out of it."

"But how do they do it? Those others?" asked Harry, too anxious to care about how whingy his voice sounded.

"How am I supposed to know? They just do! I don't even see them come and go."

"You don't know?!" Harry despaired.

The scream of a thousand off-key violins ripped the air: Crookshanks was sitting in front of Sirius and Bode's door, methodically scratching the glass with his sharp claws.

"Oh, for crying out loud!" Source exclaimed. "What is your problem? Just take the man and leave!"

They were trying, and trying hard. And between the bangs and screeches of Lupin's kicks and the high-pitched shrieks of the cat's claws against the glass, Harry was beginning to feel groggy.

"You'd better stop this instant," Source warned them, her right hand disappearing inside a reddish shade of her fluid clothes.

Harry froze. She was going to pull out her wand. And who knew what dangerous powers that strange being had?

Lupin saw the gesture, and responded with his strongest kick yet. "Moony won't accept this. Moony won't allow this."

Gritting his teeth, Harry came to stand between his companions and Source, pointing his wand at her. "I'm not gonna let you hurt them."

She frowned. "I have no intention of hurting them, or you. But fates are vulnerable," she said, drawing her hand out, her fingers elegantly holding her weapon of choice.

Not a wand, though.

"Erm... that's a pen."

"Exactly," said Source. "Don't make me use it."

He just gaped at her, dumbfounded.

If Lupin had heard this last interaction, he didn't show it. His attention was fully focused on finding a weak spot in the glass. Exhaustion was getting the better of him, though. Aiming at the base of the door, he staggered, and his foot ended up scratching the floor instead, leaving a dent on the striped material.

Crookshanks clawed every inch of Sirius' door he managed to reach, faster and faster, the nightmarish noises growing louder and angrier by the second.

For someone who could barely feel his own body, Harry felt positively sick. The chamber swayed around him, the bluish horizontal lines on the walls waved languidly like leaves caressed by the lightest breeze. He felt claustrophobic, as if the entire structure was closing down on him.

Source lowered the pen a little, gazing at Harry with concern. "What is wrong with you?" she asked, this time sincerely. "Take Black, take anything, anyone! There's no need for all this kerfuffle."

"Then tell us how to do it!" Harry pleaded, his wand trembling in his hands as harrowing nausea shook his body.

"Honestly, I don't know!" She stepped forward, putting her pen away. "Oh my love, you don't look too well."

He felt awful, and he wasn't convinced that wasn't Source's doing somehow. They had come so far... eluded every obstacle, solved every enigma, put up with every oddity... and they had got here. Dear, dear Sirius, so close, just waiting to be rescued... One step away from going home and living happily ever after... And somehow Harry just knew, with as much certainty as he knew that days were bright and nights were dark...

They had failed.

It had actually felt better before, when he was agonising over the inescapability of death, and things that couldn't be changed and powers that couldn't be challenged. Now he knew there was a chance, there was a way, they could have saved Sirius, he could have saved Sirius... But everything they had done was simply not enough. Whatever it took to open those damned doors, they didn't have it. They would never have it.

Lupin fought to remain on his feet, grabbing the doorknobs for support, his strength utterly gone. Crookshanks stepped away from the wardrobe, his low mews coming out like melancholy sobs. It was all Harry needed to know that his companions had come to the same grim conclusion. And their resignation, more than anything, signalled the end of it all. Lupin's uncanny confidence, Crookshanks' magical serendipity... both had finally been defeated, along with Harry's own heroic pretensions.

It was all over, just as that. He, Lupin and Crookshanks would have to leave, and they would never see Sirius again. His godfather's name would never be cleared, and the wizarding world would always curse his memory as that of a traitor and a murderer. Lupin would never have the chance to settle things with his friend. Crookshanks would never walk along Padfoot again. And Harry would never have the home Sirius had promised him.

Harry let his arm drop helplessly, his fingers barely holding the useless wand, his eyes too tired to weep. He knew he should try and get a grip on himself, think of practical things, good things... But what? Going back to the Dursleys? To the perpetual sombreness and venomous memories of Grimmauld Place? To Hogwarts, where he would never feel safe again, dealing with a Headmaster he could no longer trust? To friends from whom he had been drifting away even before Sirius had died? To his foreseen destiny of killing or dying, of misery and total loneliness?

Nothing mattered any more. Nothing. Because he felt as if... as if...

...as if he would never be happy again.

Realisation hit him like a lightning. Raising his wand high in the air, he summoned the memory of Sirius singing 'God Rest Ye, Merry Hippogriffs', letting his godfather's joyful voice fill every part of his being. "Expecto Patronus!"

Glass cracked in a thunderous blast of silvery mist, startling everyone in the room. Harry turned to the wardrobe just in time to see the door farthest to the left shattering into a million rainbow fragments, and the magnificent form of a cinnamon-furred stag jumping free from the hanger on which James Potter had been suspended.

Lupin's legs failed him, and he collapsed on the floor, while Crookshanks ran and hid behind Harry's ankles. Source looked at all that mess with the annoyance of a maid noticing dust on the furniture.

The stag started circling them all in a dignified gallop, his head menacingly down, his antlers piercing the air in sharp strokes. At first, it seemed to Harry that the animal was flickering, disappearing for two seconds to reappear on the third. Only when the stag completed two circles around them did the boy's eyes perceive the cause of the phenomenon.

Toweringly tall figures of humanoid shape, made of the exactly same material as the walls, floor and ceiling, surrounded him, Lupin, Crookshanks and Source, hovering between them and the stag. Perfectly camouflaged against the background, no features or details could be descried; only when they moved could Harry see the discreet waving of the horizontal stripes.

"Dementors!" Lupin gasped.

Source looked around at the hideous creatures, flabbergasted. She seemed frankly surprised to see them there.

As the Dementors turned their attention to the stag, cowering from his presence, Harry ran to check on Lupin. "Professor? Are you all right?"

"Much better than thirty seconds ago," the man muttered. "Give me a hand?"

Clinging to Harry's arm and the doorknob nearest to Sirius, the werewolf tried to rise to his feet.

And skidded back to the floor when the door creaked open.

"I don't believe this," said Harry, torn between laughing and screaming.

"Don't complain," Lupin chided him. "Let's take Sirius off that hanger and get the hell out of this place."

Harry feared the hanger that spiralled around the rail would give them as much trouble as the doors had. The device, however, let go of Sirius' body as soon as Harry touched his arms. Unprepared for the heavy load that fell on his shoulders, the boy found himself lying on Lupin's legs, with his godfather sprawled over both of them.

"Uff!"

"Sorry, Professor."

Harry's hopes that Sirius would wake up once removed from the wardrobe were squashed by the sight — and weight — of the totally lifeless man on top of him. With considerable difficulty, he and Lupin disentangled themselves and laid Sirius on the floor, arranging his limbs so he would look a bit less like an abandoned rag doll.

The boy raised his head and squinted, in search of the almost invisible Dementors. It was impossible to tell how many there were, but the stag was doing his best to herd them away. He counted with unexpected help: Source, apparently unaffected by the creatures, tried to shoo them off with angry gestures and shouts of "Back! Back! Bad Dementor!" The Dementors didn't seem too keen to obey her, though.

"They seem much stronger than any Dementor I've ever seen," said Lupin. "Prongs won't be able to hold them off forever."

It took this long for Harry's mind truly register that the stag wasn't ghostly silver as usual, but cinnamon-coloured and rather solid. Harry had known that the form of his Patronus was somehow inspired by his father's Animagus form, but... could it be that his Patronus was Prongs somehow?

"He certainly has Prongs' knack for last-minute rescues," Lupin grinned, as if reading Harry's thoughts. "I so wish Sirius were awake to see him..."

Harry wished Sirius were awake, full stop. "What do we do? Mobilicorpus on Sirius and run for it? All the way back through the maze?"

"There's another way out."

"You saw it in the vision?"

"Yes."

"Where is it?"

"I have no idea."

Harry rolled his eyes. "I knew you'd say that. How does it look like?"

"Like a fissure in the ground."

Thirty feet away, Crookshanks snarled, his fur bristling from whiskers to tail: one of the Dementors was leaning down toward him, the silhouette of a spidery hand stretching out to catch him.

"No!" Harry yelled. Prongs responded to his alarm by ramming into that Dementor's body.

The creature was rent in shreds by the stag's antlers.

"What the hell...?" exclaimed Harry.

Thin leaves of the striped fabric floated in the air, light as feathers, before falling to the ground. Some got stuck in Prongs' antlers, and the poor animal was shaking his head in a frenzy to get rid of them. One landed on Sirius' chest.

Harry touched it gingerly, half expecting it to burst into flames.

It didn't. "Feels like... paper."

Lupin took the shred in his hand, sniffed it, rubbed it between his fingers, crumpled it in a ball then spread it open again. "Looks like the page of a Muggle notebook."

Harry looked around him in shock. The entire chamber, every alcove and corridor of the maze... all made of paper?

A brilliant smile lit Lupin's face. "That's our way out of here."

"What?"

"Get Crookshanks. We're leaving."

Judging that this was probably not the best occasion for questions, the boy ran to fetch the cat. He found him curled into a small fur ball behind the wardrobe, all shivers and frightened mews. At least three Dementors seemed eager to devour the cat's last good feeling, but they were forced to keep their distance as Prongs, although distracted by the paper shreds in his antlers, stood protectively close.

"It's okay, mate," Harry murmured to the cat, stroking his back reassuringly. "We're on our way."

Crookshanks didn't protest or even move when Harry scooped him up and carried him to where Lupin and Sirius were. The Dementors didn't like that and tried to attack, but now Source also stood between them and their prey.

"Oh, honestly!" she huffed, helping Prongs to free his antlers. "A waste of good paper, that's what this is."

Harry saw Lupin struggling to haul Sirius away from the wardrobe — and having managed only a few inches.

"Professor?"

"Hold on to Sirius and Crookshanks," Lupin told him. "Hold on tight. And prepare to use your wand."

The boy obeyed him at once, kneeling down beside his godfather to grasp his arm and tucking the cat safely inside his shirt. Lupin held Sirius' other arm with one hand, and raised his wand with the other.

"What's the spell?" Harry asked him, raising his wand as well.

"You're nothing but a pack of cards!!!"

No, that wasn't a spell. What Lupin did instead was stick his wand into the floor, opening a hole in the paper.

Or rather, opening a fissure in the ground.

"We have to tear a circle around us," the man instructed. "You do your side and I do mine."

"Okay!"

It was done in a matter of seconds. Using the wands as knives, they cut a paper island around them, physically separating them from the rest of the structure.

And slowly they began to fall.

"Dad!" Harry cried.

The stag turned at the boy's call, but stood where he was.

"Dad, come with us!" So what if Lupin's vision had shown only Sirius? His father was right there, so close, so real...

Prongs, however, turned his head toward the wardrobe, where Lily Potter was still suspended in undisturbable sleep... and Harry knew his father just wouldn't leave without her.

"They live in other waves," Lupin murmured, though he sounded like he was trying to console himself just as much as comfort Harry.

It hurt all the same. The boy gazed longingly at the wardrobe once more... and gasped. Behind the third door to the right, another Sirius hung from the rail beside Bode, exactly as before.

The last thing Harry saw before they vanished under the floor was Source standing not too far from the ripped section of the paper. "Good luck!" she smiled. "And sorry about the Dementors!"

She waved as they parted ways.

"I really don't get her," Harry muttered.

"Never mind that now," Lupin warned him. "Brace yourself."

"For what?"

The question was answered the next second, when their paper raft started falling faster... and faster... and much, much faster.

Harry would have screamed if he could only open his mouth; his jaws felt like they had been glued together. All his bones seemed petrified, the wind rumbling in his ears resonated inside his skull, and he mused that this was how it would feel to be inside a giant church bell when it rang. His eyelids were partially closed, stuck in mid-blink, and all he could see was Crookshanks' head sticking out from the collar of his shirt. The cat was looking straight up, pupils reduced to slits, and a hurricane of colours reflected in his irises.

And in a far cry from the outlandish situation he found himself in, Harry sensed in the air the perfume of ripe peaches.

The fall took just long enough for Harry begin to wonder if they would ever meet the ground. They did, quite roughly, in fact; but not as badly as the laws concerning gravity and bone endurance would have implied. And not before Harry felt some kind of cloth slapping his cheek and shoulder.

He allowed himself to lie still where he had dropped. They might have ended up inside a cage of Blast-Ended Skrewts, for all he knew, but right now he was too tired to care. If he could only have one minute, or five, hopefully fifteen, to just rest there, eyes closed to whatever trouble was about to swallow him next...

"Harry! Harry, are you hurt?"

Yeah, so much for that dream. "I'm fine, Professor. You?"

"In one piece," said Lupin dryly.

Crookshanks was thrashing inside Harry's shirt, fighting for freedom.

"Ouch! Easy, mate!" The boy groaned, sitting up and releasing the cat before those claws could do much damage. "There, off you go,"

They hadn't ended up in a cage of Blast-Ended Skrewts. It was a bit too soon to tell if their luck had finally changed, though, since the paper raft — which was nowhere to be found now — had carried them back to King's Cross train station, between platforms nine and ten — or rather, four and five, according to the numbers on the markers. The veiled archway was there, just as before, the cloth dancing with the breeze no one could feel. Also as before, the Muggles in the station were completely oblivious to their existence and presence.

And just a few feet away, Lupin was struggling to get out from under a still unconscious Sirius. "If I didn't know better, I'd think he keeps doing it on purpose," the werewolf muttered. The expression on his face, however, wasn't nearly as cranky as the words and tone suggested.

Harry covered his mouth, hiding a traitorous grin. The urge to laugh out loud, to jump and dance in exultation threatened to overwhelm him — they had done it! they had brought Sirius back through the veil! — but it was too soon, much too soon to celebrate victory. The last thing he wanted now was to tempt fate. Particularly a fate with a twisted sense of humour.

Misreading Harry's face, Lupin rolled his eyes. "I know I must look hilarious, but I could really use a little help here...?"

Together, they gently laid Sirius on his back, looking him up and down to make sure he was all there. Crookshanks crouched beside his head, sniffing his ear, licking his cheek, then mewing what could only be a call.

Harry pressed his ear against the man's chest in search of a proof he was truly alive. "I can't..."

"Good," said Lupin.

"What?!"

"Our hearts aren't beating here either," the werewolf reminded him. "If his were, that would mean something would have gone horribly wrong."

"Oh."

"Come, we have to take him to the Pentagram." Pointing his wand at Sirius, Lupin cast, "Mobilicorpus."

Or tried to. Sirius remained where he was, completely inert.

"Mobilicorpus!" Lupin insisted, paying attention to every syllable, to no better results.

"You're tired, Professor," said Harry politely. "It's been a really long day, and last night was the full moon..."

"Try a spell, Harry. Any spell."

The boy frowned, but did as he was told. "Lumos."

Not even a spark.

"Oops."

"I don't think magic works in this place."

"No magic at all?" Harry gulped. "What about the Pentagram?"

"We were tangible inside it," the man murmured to himself. "Only one way to find out, I'm afraid."

Of course, that meant carrying Sirius to the Pentagram — on the other side of the station — the old, traditional way.

With good intentions, Harry tried to do the job on his own, but Lupin would not be dissuaded from doing his part. And after only twenty steps, the boy was relieved by that. Sirius might be terribly thin, but he was taller than both of them and totally uncooperative; he weighed heavily on their shoulders, and his feet dragged on the ground.

Crookshanks led the way, naturally. Muggles walked through them every now and them, making the journey even more unsettling. The station had never looked so big to Harry, and the only thing that kept him from falling was the little mantra he kept repeating in his head. This is Sirius. He's worth all this and so much more.

Thankfully, the Pentagram was still there, between those other platforms nine and ten. The three humans collapsed on the floor as soon as they were inside the perimeter. Harry choked with the feel of air rushing through his trachea, and the furious drumming of his heartbeat blared inside his head.

"Pull his legs into the pentagon," said Lupin, accommodating Sirius on his lap.

The task offered some difficulty, as they all became visible — and solid — to the Muggles once inside the Pentagram. A man carrying a large shopping bag stumbled over them, and spat a mean comment about animals and drug users perambulating in public places. A little boy let go of his mother's hand to try and pet Crookshanks; when the cat stepped back with a warning hiss, he burst into tears.

"Don't touch that ugly thing!" the mother scolded him. "Covered with fleas, I bet."

Afraid they would get trampled by the crowd — or that Crookshanks would decide to show the woman his opinion of her —, Harry hurried to make sure he and his companions had all their limbs inside the pentagon. "Where's the spell?"

Lupin handed him the second piece of parchment he had written in the Room of Requirement. This one contained only two words.

"Domum Regressus!"

The blink of an eye. And King's Cross station was gone.

In its place was a small living room with wooden floor and pale green wallpaper, ancient chairs and a couch covered by a cream-coloured sheet. No candles or chalk lines. No salt, sugar, apples, coffee or vinegar. No mirrors, swords, brooms or cups.

"Oh fuck," Harry groaned under his breath. "Something went wrong, didn't it?"

Lupin didn't answer. He just sat there, looking at the room, mesmerised.

"This isn't Hogwarts... or is it?" Harry wondered what happened to the Room of Requirement when there was nobody requesting anything inside.

"I believe this is my house," said Lupin slowly.

"Your house?"

"I think so."

"You're not sure? How can you not be sure?"

"I'm not sure this was how my house looked like last time I saw it."

Crookshanks didn't seem to mind one way or another. He climbed on Sirius' chest, and licked his chin.

Acknowledging the cat's wisdom, Harry set his priorities straight and left his concerns about their whereabouts for later, and looked for a pulse in Sirius' wrist and neck.

And there it was, strong and stable.

Harry had never heard more beautiful music. He gazed up at Lupin, hoping the look on his face would be enough to convey the wonderful news, as he couldn't trust his voice to work at this point.

Lupin took a deep breath, and let it out in a long, soul-cleansing sigh.

Harry turned his attention back to Sirius, really seeing him this time, and was shaken by a jolt of surprise. His godfather's appearance had changed considerably from how he had looked in the wardrobe or even in the train station. The hair was a bit shorter, at shoulder length, and was clean and soft as if it had been washed no more than a few hours before. His face looked fuller and most of the lines around his eyes had vanished, restoring the beauty he had flaunted in the old photo of the Potters' wedding and in Snape's Pensieve. The old robes had been replaced by faded black jeans and a white tee shirt, which Sirius' torso filled healthily — a far cry from the gaunt, bony frame of a minute ago.

He was about to point this out to Lupin, but the words died on his lips as soon as his eyes rested on the werewolf's figure. The changes were not as remarkable as in Sirius, but fairly easy to spot all the same. A good part of his greying hair had turned back to its natural light brown, although some flecks of silver remained stubbornly near his temples. His clothes had returned to their original colour, and the ugliest patches in the fabric had mended seamlessly.

Crookshanks looked the same, mercifully. But Harry's own clothes had suffered the same mysterious destiny Sirius' and Lupin's had. Not that he was going to complain about it: not only they were of perfectly acceptable colours now, but they also fitted him as if bought specially for him, and not for a much larger cousin.

"Maybe we are not in the hands of such a cruel and horrible fate after all," Lupin grinned, following Harry's gaze. "Maybe."

They raised Sirius from the floor — with a lot less difficulty, as their strength seemed to have returned in full — and sat him on the couch, placing a pillow under his head. Harry sat at his left, grasping his wrist firmly between his hands, drawing comfort from his godfather's steady pulse. Crookshanks leapt back onto Sirius' lap, his forepaws placed against Sirius' belly, moving back and forth along with the man's calm breathing. And at Sirius' right, Lupin knelt on the couch, brushing the long strands of black hair away from his friend's face. "Padfoot?" he whispered. "Padfoot, can you hear me?"

No response.

"Heavy sleeper," Lupin told Harry, trying to reassure them both. "Always been, since school."

Crookshanks mewed worriedly, nuzzling the fabric of Sirius' tee shirt.

"Padfoot, come on," Lupin called again. "You've slept long enough. Time to wake up."

Again, nothing.

"The puppy is here, you know. He'd like to play with you. You're not going to disappoint him, are you?"

Harry frowned at the werewolf, at a loss about what puppy he was talking about.

But whatever the cryptic words had meant, they did the trick. With a grumpy groan, Sirius opened one eye.

And Harry had to close both of his for an instant, as waves of tears threatened to surge. Don't break down, he told himself. You're not a baby.

Regaining a tiny bit of composure, he looked up at Sirius again, and found him watching him with the oddest expression on his face. Sirius turned to Lupin then, who seemed even shakier than Harry felt, and the confusion in the blue eyes increased. Crookshanks crawled under Sirius' shirt, which failed to improve the situation.

Harry's heart contracted in sudden terror. What if Sirius had forgot all about them? What if his memory had been erased? What if his soul had been damaged? What if this wasn't Sirius at all? What if the true Sirius was the one that had remained in the wardrobe? What if the paper Dementors...?

"Padfoot? Please say something?" Lupin asked with the softest voice.

Sirius twitched his lips. "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain."

Lupin and Harry exchanged a troubled look.

"I mean, something that makes sense...?" the werewolf clarified.

An arched eyebrow, and a smile of sheer amusement. "Then you're probably asking the wrong person, Moony."

It was the most beautiful smile Harry had ever seen, cunning and hearty, confident even while self-mocking. It was the smile of someone who had just convinced Minerva McGonagall to eat a Canary Cream, or uncovered the ultimate secret of the universe and found it to be a delicious private joke.

Whatever reasons Harry had had not to cry were completely forgot when he dived into his godfather's arms for the hug that would make up for all the hugs they had never shared.