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Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

The Hogwarts Express goes all the way through England. The hubbub of the students is well accompanied by chocolate frogs and Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. At the edge of noon, some children fall asleep and when they enter Scotland, the train has become silent, rattles unstoppable, crossing long bridges over which the slightest drizzle falls. The train delves into the forests and frightens the fairies, who hide when they hear it arrive. The Hogwarts Express murmur the denizens of the thicket, the younger magicians go back to school. At six o'clock in the afternoon, it is announced that Hogsmeade is nearby, and the students, James among them, put on their robes and their uniforms. Peter makes sure to carry all of his stuff and Sirius's is silent, as every year, for the seventh time in a row, when the silhouette of Hogwarts begins to be visible in the distance.

He would have a hard time telling how he feels. What the four towers of the castle mean for someone who has never had a family worthy of such a name. He couldn't explain why he never speaks when the train stops and horseless chariots take them up the hill toward the only home that has given a chance to make magic valuable, and also found him a family.

He made the same trip seven years ago, and that night, the Sorting Hat looked inside him and Sirius knows he saw the roots of evil, the craves for power, the seeds of ambition and anger. But the shield of his house says courage, and glory and Sirius promised the hat that he would die sooner to betray Godric Griffyndor's spirit if they gave it a chance.

He asked the hat to please put him on Gryffindor, and for the first time in his life, he earned the honor of sitting down to dine away from the Slytherins, with that boy named Potter. That energetic child that announces behind his glasses in front of all Gryffindor students that he would become the first myopic seeker in history and that he would be not only the first but the greatest of all.

- Do you like Quidditch?

They were the first words James said to the boy from fragile appearance that sat in front of Sirius, apparently overwhelmed by the bombastic theatricality of the school.

-I'm not very good at sports- Remus confessed.

Sirius doesn't remember that conversation for years. And yet now, the details are sharp. Clear. He crosses the hall and they come toward him without need to invoke them.

- You're half-breed, right? - James said.

Remus fell apart. He blushed. Sirius first felt that impulse to protect him that he has not yet abandoned him. He remembers that disappointed look for a second to the boy with glasses who liked during the train and the dinner, and his food turned sour for a moment.

-Yes- Remus admitted. - I am.

- Great - James enthused, - because you have to tell me a lot of things about something that I don't quite understand of the muggle world.

Sirius and Remus looked at him with equal interest.

- It's about football, you know, football. I have read that the ball does not fly. How do you play it, if the damn ball doesn't fly?

Remus ended up making a drawing on a used and scribbled parchment to try to explain what he knew about football, which turned out to be not too much, and Sirius also asked him about muggle music and overheard him speak for the first time of things like heating, strawberry milkshake, and water-propulsion airplanes. It was the best dinner of his life and seven years later, when he walks through the huge wooden doors of Hogwarts with James, Sirius breathes hard and tries to hold back that insistent pumping in his heart. He experiences the same almost religious feeling as then. After all those years.

Hogwarts is not home.

Is better.

And if he doesn't see Remus NOW he will have to give him painkillers, because all he hears is the howl of his blood. His stomach hurts, fuck, and never, EVER, has his stomach hurt at the prospect of meeting someone.

He is not in the Gryffindor tower, he does not appear in the Common Room and, either he is the best English hide and seek player in the world or he has been swallowed up by the land. When dinner time approaches and the first years have finished their ritual with the hat, Sirius searches the rowdy crowd in the dining room, trying to hide his anxiety without success. James finds what he's looking for before him.

- No. Fucking. Way. Do they always have to do that?