The parchment had been on his desk for four days before Harry actually looked at it properly.
It was a list in his own handwriting, cramped and slightly rushed, usual for him when he was writing something down quickly before he forgot it. There were six bullet points, and the last three were underlined.
Those were locations in the castle where he’d found serpent carvings in the stonework. He’d made this list over the past few months, ever since he’d got serious about discovering the Chamber. It had been tucked into the back of a Charms notebook, and he’d been meaning to come back to it in a day or two once he’d confirmed a few more positions.
But then the entire affair with Sirius happened, and the discovery of the Chamber a backseat.
He stared at the list before pulling Slytherin’s tome from its place at the bottom of his trunk. He set it beside the list and sat for a moment, just looking at both of them.
Three months. He’d barely touched the tome in the last three months, which was, if he thought about it, slightly embarrassing. He’d been carrying this thing around, the only copy in existence of Salazar Slytherin’s personal writings, and lately it had been doing nothing except gathering dust in his trunk because he’d been too busy with other stuff.
Sirius, and the evidence, and Dumbledore, and Fudge stumbling into the headmaster’s office with his face the colour of old cheese, and Daphne and Susan, and the training sessions with everyone in the Room of Requirement, and whatever the crisis happened to be that particular week.
The Chamber had slipped quietly to the back of everything, filed under things that could wait. It had felt reasonable at the time, but it felt slightly less reasonable now that he looked at his own handwriting and realized how much had simply been left sitting.
He sat down on his bed, his curtains drawn across, and opened the tome to the section he’d marked with a folded piece of parchment. The script was fine and old, the ink faded to brown, and Slytherin’s vocabulary was sometimes rather colorful. He was terse, exact, and occasionally contemptuous of people who hadn’t kept up. It wasn’t the easiest read on a good day, and on a day when you were trying to extract meaning from incidental details rather than explicit statements, it required a different level of patience.
He began reading. Not skimming, not looking for specific passages, but truly reading. He was trying to understand Slytherin rather than just extracting information from his writing, which was what he’d been doing for so long and realized just how foolish that approach was.
An hour later he was still going, and he’d covered three pages of his own notes.
The problem he’d kept running into earlier was that the Chamber was barely mentioned in the tome at all. He’d gone through it twice looking for explicit references and found maybe a dozen, none of them helpful in the way he’d initially hoped for. There were no maps, no coordinates, and no instructions. There was no entry in the index reading Chamber of Secrets, much less how to find it.
The first time he’d reached that conclusion he’d been genuinely frustrated, convinced he was missing something, and had wasted two evenings re-reading the same sections in case the answer was there and he’d just not been paying close enough attention.
It wasn’t. He’d just been looking for the wrong thing.
He understood that now, reading it again after so long and a slightly clearer head. Slytherin wasn’t writing for an audience. He was writing for himself, the way a person actually wrote in private, which meant he didn’t explain the obvious, didn’t describe his own bedroom every time he mentioned going to bed, and obviously didn’t insert a footnote about the location of the kitchen every time he mentioned eating. The Chamber appeared in the tome the way any familiar place appeared in a private journal. As context, not as subject.
Which was exactly what made it useful, provided one read it as a series of incidental portraits rather than as a guide.
He began going through each and every mention methodically, writing down the surrounding details. He was not looking for directions anymore, but for characteristics.
By the time Terry came back from dinner and stuck his head around the dormitory curtain to check Harry was still alive, Harry had two pages of notes and one very clear emerging picture.
“You alright?”
“Fine. Just working on something.”
The boy nodded, took one more look at the three separate parchments spread across the bed, and quietly retreated.
He paused at the door. “Longbottom and the others were looking for you, by the way. And there’s still some food left if you want it. I nabbed something from the kitchens.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
“Right… You’ve got ink on your cheek, by the way.”
Harry wiped his face, found nothing, and heard Terry’s quiet laugh before the door closed.
Harry turned back to his notes he had compiled after a thorough reading, mostly between the lines.
1. The Chamber had multiple rooms.
2. It had unusual acoustics.
3. It was deep enough that groundwater was a seasonal factor.
4. It was close enough to the Founders’ living quarters that Slytherin had described retiring to it casually, after meals, when he wanted somewhere private to think.
5. It was large enough for serious magical work.
And in one passing reference that Harry had almost skipped the first time, Slytherin mentioned the lower galleries in a context that implied the castle was not yet fully built around it at the time of writing.
Which meant the Chamber predated the castle.
He sat back and read that sentence again before looking up at the ceiling of his dormitory thoughtfully.
The Chamber wasn’t a hidden room in Hogwarts. It was the thing Hogwarts had been built on top of.
That changed the question entirely.
Everyone who’d ever searched for the Chamber had been searching the wrong thing. They had looked for walls, hidden passages, maybe concealed doors in rooms that already existed. After all, Hogwarts was a castle with more secrets than it was possible to catalogue, so the assumption had been reasonable, but it was wrong. The real question wasn’t where in the castle the Chamber was. It was why nobody had found it by accident in a thousand years, given how many renovations and explorations and curious students the place had seen.
And the answer to that was simple, because you didn’t find things you didn’t know to dig for, and nobody had ever dug below the foundations, because foundations were just rock.
Unless they weren’t.
He thought about how many people had looked for the Chamber over the centuries. Historians. Curious alumni. There had been a whole wave of searches after the last set of incidents, he knew that much from the history he’d been able to piece together. None of them had found anything. None of them had even come close, as far as he could tell.
But they’d all been looking up.
Nobody looks down, Harry thought. Not when you’re in a castle. You look at walls and floors and ceilings and under staircases and behind tapestries, because those are the things that have secrets in them. The rock below the foundations isn’t the castle. It’s just the hill.
Unless Slytherin built his secret into the hill on purpose.
Unless that was the point.
He thought about the serpent carvings. The ones on the lower floors, the ones in the foundation corridors that he’d been systematically cataloguing until now. He’d started noticing them some time ago, these small, detailed, oddly fine carvings that nobody had ever seemed to think were significant. Decorative, was the general assumption, if anyone thought about them at all. Just Slytherin’s aesthetic leaving its mark on the architecture of the castle he’d helped build.
Harry pulled out his other list and set it beside the notes he’d just made.
Six locations. All on the lowest floors. All below the level where regular castle architecture ended and foundations began.
He reached for another piece of parchment and started drawing.
He wasn’t a cartographer by any stretch, but the Marauder’s Map had given him a solid enough sense of the castle’s layout that he could produce something workable. He marked each of the six carving locations, then stepped back from the parchment and looked at the pattern they formed.
They weren’t scattered. They were placed. Deliberately, at specific intervals, like the corners and midpoints of a boundary. Like someone marking out the edge of a property, or the perimeter of a ward.
Like anchor points.
He turned back to the tome, found the section on magical anchoring theory that he’d read weeks ago and now re-read with considerably more attention. When he was done, he sat quietly for a very long time with the two pieces of parchment in front of him.
He was still sitting there when he heard Terry’s voice, an hour later.
“Are you sure you’re alright? You haven’t eaten.”
Harry blinked. “I’m fine. I’m onto something. I just need to check a few more things.”
“It’s nearly midnight, mate.”
“I’ll go to bed soon.”
Terry shrugged as he got into his bed and closed his curtains again. Harry turned back to his notes and didn’t go to bed for another hour after that.
-Break-
The castle the following afternoon was quiet. Most students were still at the Quidditch pitch, watching the usual spectacle that unfolded when Gryffindor played Slytherin, which meant the corridors were rather empty.
Harry had made his way to the Come and Go Room right after breakfast, answering the questions he’d expected to be directed at him by his friends. He hadn’t told them entirely what he was up to, but he knew it was coming soon.
The tome sat open in front of him.
He’d asked the room to throw up a map of the castle in the air and he was slowly, magically, marking out the locations of every serpent carving he could remember, and made the room show the lower floors and the passages that didn’t appear on any official plan. He cross-referenced what he got with the Marauder’s Map.
He was so focused he didn’t hear Susan approach until she pulled out the chair beside him.
“You’re doing that thing,” she said.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you’re technically present but you’ve actually gone somewhere else entirely.” She looked at the map hovering in the air. “What is that?”
“Map of Hogwarts.”
“I can see it’s a map of Hogwarts, Harry.” She sat down and dropped her bag on the floor. “Why have you drawn little snake heads all over it?”
He hesitated for a moment, but because it was Susan, there wasn’t much point in being cagey. He offered her a hand and pulled her closer, gesturing toward the map.
She looked at it for a moment and squinted closely at the overlapping displays. She looked down at the Marauder’s Map before looking back again, staring at one of the marked points. “These are carvings? In the actual stonework?”
“Yeah. I’ve been cataloguing them. Stopped when everything happened with Sirius. But look at the distribution.”
Susan stared at the map, staying quiet for a moment. “They’re not random, right?”
“Yeah. If you draw lines between them, they converge.” He wordlessly asked the room to do the same on the map. “Down and roughly central. On something underneath the castle.”
“Which is interesting, because most of the carvings are on the lower floors or in the foundations.”
“Nobody decorates foundations,” Harry said.
“Unless they’re not decorations.” She looked up. “Ward anchors?”
“That’s what I think.”
He’d spent an hour the night before re-reading the section of the tome that covered magical anchoring theory, and Slytherin’s description of how large sustained enchantments were tied to specific locations through physical markers was detailed enough that Harry was fairly confident now.
“He writes about it in here. Physical markers that tie big magical workings to specific places. And these carvings are too carefully placed, too consistent in design, to be aesthetic choices. Someone put them exactly there, at exactly those heights, in exactly that pattern.”
Susan turned to him. “Anchors for what?”
“For whatever’s underneath.” He kept his voice level. “The Chamber of Secrets.”
She didn’t react with surprise. She just looked at the map for another moment before turning back to him. “Nobody has ever found it, Harry. Apart from the obvious, of course.”
“That’s because nobody’s been looking the right way.”
“How long have you been back at this, properly?”
“Four days this week.”
Susan looked at the multiple pages of notes, and the three draft maps he’d abandoned and replaced. “Four days,” she said. “You skipped dinner last night because you were working on this.”
“I ate a bit.”
“Boot told me this morning you were still at your desk when he got up for the bathroom at one in the morning.”
“I was nearly done.”
She gave him a look filled with a mix of exasperation and fondness. “Harry. You do know you can think about something and also sleep.”
“I know. I’ll sleep more once I’ve confirmed a few more things.”
“That’s exactly what someone who hasn’t been sleeping says,” she sighed, but she let it go and looked back at the map. “Alright. The Chamber isn’t inside the castle.”
“It predates the castle. I think Slytherin chose this site because the cave system already existed. He selected the location, the Founders built Hogwarts here, and he adapted what was already below the rock to his own purposes.” He turned to the passage in the tome he’d been reading when she arrived. “There’s a reference here. He describes the site in terms that suggest it had significance before Hogwarts existed. And another where he mentions the lower galleries getting spring groundwater. Galleries, as in plural. It’s not one room. It’s a complex, deep enough that the water table is a factor. Far below anything in the current castle.”
Susan stared at the passage he was pointing at, even though she understood zilch.
“Like here,” Harry pointed. “This says he used it as a retreat. Somewhere he went when Gryffindor was being his usual insufferable self.”
“He uses it the way you’d use your own room. Instinctively. Without having to explain where it is.”
Harry nodded as he turned to another page. “Here. The lower hall proved more conducive to thought than Godric’s voice. Not a hidden fortress. Just somewhere that belongs to him.”
“The lower hall. Not a room. A hall. With acoustics worth noting.” She noted.
Harry pointed out a different part. “He mentions the spring runoff in the same section. Different year. Same place. Which tells you it was a recurring feature, not unusual. Just part of managing the space.” He looked at the map. “And if it predates the castle, that’s why no renovations ever turned it up. Every significant change Hogwarts has gone through in a thousand years has been focused on the structure above ground. The foundations are original. Nobody goes below the foundations.”
“Unless they know to.” She was quiet, working through it. “You’re the first person with a reason to look below them.”
“Plus Parseltongue.” He looked at the map. “The entrance will be a serpent. Something built to respond to Parseltongue. That’s the part I’m most confident about. His whole magical practice is about personalization. Keying things to bloodline, to language, to a specific kind of caster. He didn’t build things for general access.”
Susan walked over and stared at the map. “Which carvings haven’t you checked yet?”
“Three in the lower-west section. And one I haven’t been able to locate precisely.”
“When are you going?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“I’m coming.” She said it simply, pre-empting the objection. “You’re going to be in the lower levels of a very old castle at midnight trying to locate the entrance to a legendary chamber that had a monster living inside it. Having someone at your back is sensible, not optional. I’m not asking to watch. I’m asking to be useful.” She met his eyes. “Do you object?”
“… No.”
“Good.” She pulled the notes toward her. “Show me the route you’re planning.”
He walked her through it. The lower-west section first, then the foundations passage, and then the return via the back staircase on the east side that came out near the kitchens. She asked two questions, practical ones about timing and checkpoints, and then sat back.
“What do you think the entrance actually looks like?” she asked. “The physical thing.”
Harry had thought about this. “Probably something in the floor. Slytherin’s style of magic tends toward things that are hidden in plain sight. Not in the walls, not behind a tapestry. Somewhere that people walk over every day without looking down.” He paused. “Everything in the tome points to the entrance being in the foundations passage itself, or adjacent to it. Below where the anchor points converge.”
Susan looked at the map. “We’ll find it.”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “I think we will.”
-Break-
Daphne found him later that evening. Or she found the version of him that was physically present while most of his brain was somewhere else. She dropped onto the sofa beside him, close enough that her shoulder was against his, and didn’t say anything for a while.
Harry had the Marauder’s Map on his knee, the tome beside it, and a parchment half-covered in working notes.
“Chamber thing?” she said eventually.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’ve been looking at the same two inches of that page for fifteen minutes.”
He turned to look at her. She’d already glanced at the map, taking in the marked points and the converging lines in two seconds, that was apparently enough for her.
“Getting closer,” he said. “The carvings converge on a point below the foundations. The Chamber predates the castle. Slytherin chose the site because the cave system was already there.”
Daphne looked thoughtful, and Harry smiled. She had a different way of processing things compared to Susan, always had. Where Susan’s thinking was visible, questions asked and angles checked, Daphne took information in and came back with conclusions that were almost always accurate.
“How far below?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. Deep enough for the water table to be a factor.”
“Natural geology, then. Not constructed architecture.”
“Right. Which is why a thousand years of renovations never turned it up. Nobody digs below the foundations.”
She looked at the map for another moment. “The entrance must be guarded.”
“Parseltongue. I’m sure about that.” He set the map down. “Every magical system he describes in the tome is personalized to specific casters. The entrance will be a serpent, built to respond to someone who speaks to it.”
“You are one of them.”
“I am one of them.” He agreed. “I tried Parseltongue on the tome, months ago. Nothing happened.”
“The tome is writing. The entrance is a built magical object. Those are different things. If the entrance is physical, set into rock, it needs to be spoken to directly. Just because he’s written the tome doesn’t mean it automatically carries his active warding unless he’s enchanted it.”
Harry looked at her. “Yeah. That’s exactly it.”
“I can tell you’ve been thinking about it.” She smiled and turned back to her own parchment. “The anchor theory is solid work.”
“Susan said the same.”
“Then we’re both right,” she chuckled. “I’m coming tomorrow. Before you tell me you didn’t ask me, I know everything.”
“I didn’t object,” he smiled.
“Good.” She poked his chest, looking up at him. She looked rather cute at that moment, he thought with a smile. “Have you thought about what you’d actually say to it? When you find the entrance?”
Harry blinked, her question registering with him. He hadn’t, specifically. He’d been focused on finding it and hadn’t thought much about the moment of speaking to it. “Uh… No. Not in detail.”
“You might want to think about it. Improvising Parseltongue in a foundation passage at midnight seems like something to avoid.” She glanced at him. “What does it feel like, by the way? Using it.”
“Like thinking out loud,” Harry said. “But the thoughts are shaped differently. It comes from a different part of your head. Harder to explain than that.”
Daphne was quiet for a moment. “And if you open it. What do you think you’ll actually find down there?”
“I don’t know. The tome describes the space but not in any detail that lets you picture it.” Harry looked at the map. “A thousand years of preserved magical workspace. Slytherin writes about the anchor system having preservation properties. Things tied to anchors don’t decay the way normal things do.”
“So it might actually be intact.”
“Might be.”
She was quiet for a moment before she went back to her own work, and Harry went back to his. After a while she said, without looking up, “You’re going to be insufferable when you find it, you know.”
“Probably.”
“I mean monumentally insufferable. I want it on the record that I knew about this from almost the beginning.”
“Duly noted,” Harry said with a grin as he cupped her cheek and leaned in.
Daphne turned to him and rolled her eyes before meeting him halfway, kissing him lovingly.
-Break-
The lower floors of Hogwarts at half past eleven on a Wednesday were cold and very quiet.
Harry had the Marauder’s Map in one hand, his wand lit dimly. Behind him, Susan and Daphne moved quietly. They navigated the corridors easily, having done this numerous times before. The route was clear of any Prefect patrol, and there was no sight of Peeves either.
This floor was different from the ones above. The ceiling was lower, the stone older, and the torches set in iron brackets that looked considerably more permanent than anything upstairs. There was a smell of dampness in the air.
“Two more on this corridor,” Susan said quietly, checking her copy of the notes.
The first carving was three feet from the floor, almost invisible in low light. A serpent, not stylized but genuinely detailed, coiled around a circle of knotwork. The craftsmanship was extraordinary for a foundation corridor. The stone around it was original and unrepaired, sitting here since the castle went up.
Harry crouched and pressed his fingertips to the surface. Beneath his hand the stone felt slightly different in a weird way he’d gotten better at recognizing over the last week.
“Mark it,” he said.
Daphne made a note on the map.
They moved on. The second carving was at the base of a staircase the Marauder’s Map included and that Harry suspected hadn’t seen a student in twenty years, given the undisturbed dust on the first three steps. He documented it and noted the position.
They found four more that night, two on the corridor Harry had marked and two he hadn’t expected. One was barely visible, nearly entirely obscured behind a century’s worth of soot, and he wouldn’t have found it at all if Daphne hadn’t noticed the faintest outline of knotwork when she moved her wand along the wall at the right angle. She held the light while he cleaned enough of the surface to confirm it was there and document its position.
“How many is that now?” Susan asked, keeping her voice low.
“Fourteen confirmed,” Harry said. “Possibly two more I’m not sure about.” He was updating the map as he went, marking each position carefully, and the pattern was becoming clearer with every addition. The lines were converging. The area of focus was narrowing.
They were on the way back when he stopped.
The junction of the lower-west corridor and the foundations passage was a section of the castle that didn’t appear on any official map, the kind of place the Marauders had apparently found by accident and considered interesting enough to include anyway. The wall here was exposed bedrock in places, the original stone of the hilltop showing through where the castle builders had left it unfaced.
And in the bedrock, not the dressed stone of the castle but the raw hill itself, there was a serpent.
It was smaller than the others. Simpler in design, the knotwork more worn, and the lines blurred at the edges. It seemed older than even the castle’s foundations.
It sat at floor level exactly, right where the bedrock emerged from beneath the lowest course of Hogwarts’ stone, and below the serpent’s coils there was a seam in the rock. Horizontal, so fine it was nearly invisible in the torchlight, running directly into the floor and tracing the outline of a slab that was seamlessly fitted into the surrounding bedrock with a gap barely wider than a hair.
The door was not on the wall. It was on the floor.
Harry held his wand low and let the light catch the seam at an angle.
There it was.
“Is that it?” Susan whispered.
“That’s it.” He crouched. “A door in the floor. Angled, probably. Descending.”
Daphne was on his other side, absolutely still, looking at it with a look of intense focus on her face. Being a Slytherin, this must be particularly interesting for her.
Harry looked at the serpent carving. The worn knotwork, the blurred scales, all of it was older than everything around it, older than Hogwarts, older probably than anything else in this building. A thousand years of castle above it, a thousand years of students and teachers and ghosts and history, and all of it built on top of this.
He breathed out slowly.
He didn’t speak an incantation or spell. To Daphne and Susan, it was just a hiss.
The seam in the rock glowed. It was very faint, and had the colour of old moonlight. It glowed for four seconds and faded back to darkness.
Harry sat back on his heels, his eyes wide. His heart was hammering, and he couldn’t pinpoint an emotion at that moment.
“It heard you,” Daphne said, her voice filled with wonder as she smiled.
“The lock recognising the key.” He looked at the serpent one more time. “It’s not open. I didn’t ask it to open. I wasn’t ready for that and I’m not going to do it unprepared. But it knows I’m here.” He stood, slowly, aware of a slight tremor in his knees that had nothing to do with crouching. “The location is confirmed. The entrance exists. And I’m the only person alive who can interact with it.”
Neither of them said anything immediately.
-Break-
The walk back was quiet. Harry was still turning the moment over in his mind, the glow in the rock seam, the way the serpent had answered him, and what the magic had felt like. It was old and patient and entirely certain of itself, as if sentient in some manner.
They were halfway back to the main staircase before Susan broke the silence.
“Have you thought about what happens after?” she asked. “Assuming you open it.”
“I’ve thought about it.” He’d been thinking about it since last night, actually, going in circles on the question of what it meant to open a chamber that had been sealed for a thousand years. “There’s no urgency. The whole point is that there’s no emergency, no threat, and nobody else who can get in. I can take my time and do it properly.”
“Properly meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning I understand what I’m walking into before I walk into it. I know what the entrance mechanism responds to. I don’t know what’s beyond it, what condition it’s in, or what the Chamber itself might do when it’s interacted with after this long.” He looked at the map in his hand. “But I’m not going down there alone or unprepared.”
“Good,” Daphne and Susan said in unison as they glanced at each other. They rolled their eyes fondly as Harry chuckled.
-Break-
Somewhere in the central highlands of Scotland, a large black dog stopped running.
He’d been moving for hours, sometimes in human form but mostly in his animagus form.
Ever since he’d obtained a functioning a wand, things had improved substantially for him. He was still weak, and magical transport was out of question, but it had made getting regular food and dry sleep possible.
He’d been tracking a deer trail that had eventually brought him out of the denser forest into a clearing, and he’d stopped at the tree line because his nose had caught something that wasn’t threat.
Something else.
He stood very still. The clearing was empty. Across it, a rocky outcrop held a shallow overhang, a natural shelter that he noticed immediately, dry and protected from wind. He moved into the clearing slowly, his nose down, sniffing.
Someone had been here. He sensed fire, cold now, two nights old at most. And underneath the smell of ash and damp moss was nothing.
He shifted. The space had been intentionally cleaned of magical traces by someone who knew how.
He moved to the overhang and checked it properly.
What he found was a parcel under a flat stone at the base of the rock face, wrapped in waxed cloth. He looked around for a moment and when he was sure it was safe, he transformed into human form and unwrapped it.
His eyes widened when he saw what it was.
Food. Properly packed food. Dried meat and hard cheese, perfect for his situation. There were no notes or markings of any kind.
He’d covered roughly forty miles in the last four days, moving at night, using Padfoot for distance and terrain, all the while watching carefully for a tail and not finding one. Either whoever had been here was substantially better at this than anyone with reason to follow him, or this wasn’t tracking at all.
Someone had been here, left this, and gone. For him, presumably, because there was no way he could believe this was coincidence.
He ran diagnostics, and when everything came safe, he ate carefully, about half of what was there, and wrapped the rest into his inner seam where he kept the blackthorn wand. He sat against the rock’s face and thought about what the parcel meant.
Someone had found him, or near enough guessed where he might travel through. And that someone had left food, cleaned their traces, and gone without announcing themselves. It was clear that the person was not trying to approach him yet. But they were also making sure he knew that someone knew where he was or might be and had left him something.
That was someone who understood the psychology of a man like him, and who’d decided that the kindest approach was to let him know he wasn’t alone without forcing him to do anything about it yet. Sirius could feel grateful for that. It would give him time to process the fact.
It was, he thought, a reasonably sophisticated approach, one that had worked, because he was sitting here thinking about it rather than running.
He looked up at the overcast sky through the trees. An owl called somewhere to the north.
He leaned back and made himself comfortable. As he stared at the sky, he thought about the name at the center of all of it. The person he’d been making his way toward since the first morning of cold air after Azkaban.
Harry. At Hogwarts.
He’d spent years in which the only image he had of Harry was the one frozen in place from the night James and Lily died. A baby. He’d held him, in those terrible hours before Hagrid came, and he’d known even then, in the wreckage of everything, that the baby was going to be alright. He’d known it and he’d still been too destroyed to do what he should have done.
He had no idea what his godson looked like. He had a name, the knowledge of what Harry once looked like, and nothing in between. The person he was trying to reach was, in nearly every way that mattered, a stranger.
Sirius had been sitting with that fact, on and off, for two weeks. It didn’t get less strange. Just as it didn’t get less painful to think about Marlene. He’d often wonder how she was doing before furiously stopping that line of thought. The pain was too much.
He had to find a way to make it right. The right way, not the way he’d imagined it in the early years before the Dementors took even that. That had been a young man’s version, immediate and violent and fueled by grief. The right way was slower and harder, one that required patience he was having to rebuild piece by piece from a foundation that Azkaban had done its best to ruin.
But it was being built. He could feel it. Unevenly, with gaps, some mornings still nearly impossible, but it was being built.
He got up and shifted to Padfoot once again, standing for a moment at the edge of the clearing, his nose up, reading the wind.
A few moments later, he moved. The distance was getting smaller every night.
TBC.