Sirius Black (Acquitted AU)

You fumbled your way out of the Floo into the front sitting room of your cottage, in that uncanny way only the Network could deliver a person: off-balance, half-smothered in soot, and clutching desperately at the battered banister for support. Sirius followed, one step behind, then nearly collapsed onto you, his arm slung over your shoulders with the blithe entitlement of a man too exhausted to assemble the usual scaffolding of pride or pretense, never mind a former inmate of Azkaban. He sagged into your side, and you half-carried, half-dragged him through the confetti of unopened post and discarded evening cloaks, past the cowering houseplants and the lopsided umbrella stand (which, for once, did not leap into song). The world outside—howling reporters, wild-eyed Aurors with jaws set in that particular way, and all the cracked-glass drama of the Ministry—collapsed behind you, as if someone had drawn a heavy velvet curtain between your threshold and the rest of the Wizarding Britain.

It was done, then. The latest in a series of catastrophes, but this time with an air of finality that left the air in your lungs feeling thin and metallic. The spell of secrecy had burst like an overripe berry; the truth, suppressed for so long, was now bursting through every channel, magical and mundane, leaving a sticky, irrefutable mess in its wake. The Prophet’s evening edition had come shrieking to life, hot off the press, and you imagined it splattered across every breakfast table in Britain by dawn: Black Cleared; True Traitor Exposed. There would be a hundred articles, a thousand think-pieces, and a dozen skittish radio bulletins—each trying to distill the story into a neat, palatable narrative for public consumption. But you had seen the truth up close, and it was ugly and splintered and not the slightest bit satisfying.

Peter Pettigrew, it turned out, was neither dead nor particularly clever at hiding—he had simply gone where no one dared look, playing the role of rat so thoroughly that not even his oldest friends could sniff out the deception. Sirius, meanwhile, had spent nearly a decade with nothing to do but replay the same two days over and over in his head, gnawing on the gristle of guilt and betrayal until his mind was as thin and translucent as parchment. Seven years in Azkaban, they said, as though it was a sentence with a clean beginning and end, instead of a slow, unspooling nightmare that wrote itself into every cell of a person until there was nothing left but the memory of pain. The Ministry, in its infinite wisdom, had pronounced him exonerated; the Wizengamot had offered up brittle applause and a perfunctory handshake, as though that could possibly stitch him back together. But Sirius was not stitched together. He was a collection of wounds with a man-shaped outline, held upright only by the stubborn will that had gotten him through the first place.

You could feel Sirius trembling against you, all skin and bone and the sort of wild, animal energy that comes from years of deprivation. Azkaban had stripped him of everything: not just his health, but his sense of ordinary time, the rhythm of comfort and care. He was malnourished, his face all sharp edges and hollowed cheeks, his hands twitching unconsciously as though they might transform at any moment into paws or claws. He was chilled to the marrow—not just from the cold of the Scottish sea, but the psychic frost of the Dementors, which clung to him even now. His eyes, once sparking with black humor, were sunken and wary, too sensitive for the low lamp light of the ramshackle cottage. Even the clatter of the Floo had clearly rattled him; he squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his forehead to your shoulder, breathing in the remnants of your soap, your sweat, anything to ground himself in the present.