Come Home + Sirius Black

five: black still at large

"So... You accidentally blew up your Aunt Marge... Ran away from home... The Knight Bus found you... and took you all the way here?"

Charlotte was staring at her 13-year-old godson standing on her doorstep after he had just rung her bell in the middle of the night, just as she was about to sleep. When she agreed to help out his maternal aunt and uncle in raising him, she did not expect it to be easy. But she did not expect him to be... so much like his father. Two years in a row she had already visited him in the hospital wing towards the end of the year after getting himself involved in things he ought not to be involved in. But what did she expect from James Potter's son?

Harry nodded, and it was clear from the way that he avoided meeting her gaze that he was expecting to get a lecture.

"She deserve it?" Her eyebrows were raised at him, though he could not see it.

"Yeah, I think so," he mumbled.

"Good work," she said, finally letting him into the house. Harry finally lifted his eyes to smile at her, and lugging his trunk behind him, he made himself at home. "I'd imagine any siblings of your uncle deserves a good knock on the head."

The boy laughed.

It was only natural for her to have frequent run-ins with the Dursleys when she visited their home to pick Harry up for her one week with him at the end of every month. And even after these twelve years, she was not fond of them.

Like all the other times she had seen him after seeing him spend a month back at the Dursleys every summer, he was looking thin. And so with a wave of her wand, Charlotte's kitchen boomed with noise as ingredients and utensils worked to make themselves into a meal for Harry. And like always, he devoured it like his life depended on it.

She didn't inquire further about the incident at the Dursleys; she knew her godson, and if he says he hadn't meant it, that it was a moment of anger, then she believed him. In fact, they hadn't spoken much as Harry ate. She was too worried about what had drove him to the point of him losing control of his magic, and she suspected he was too afraid to say anything out of fear that she'd give him a lecture similar to the one she had given him months ago, after he had found himself in a secret chamber at the bottom of Hogwarts castle.

But she noticed his eyes had glanced to the paper laid out on the dinner table, and her mind shifted away from Marjorie Dursley onto another matter entirely. The headline read, in big black font, "BLACK STILL AT LARGE", and was accompanied by a photograph of Sirius Black, almost unrecognizably shaggy. He was laughing in the photograph, but it was one that looked like it was of insanity, and not of humor, like Charlotte had been so used to.

"Have you heard of him? The man in the Prophet?"

Harry shook his head. "Only earlier, on the Knight Bus. The conductor said he was a supporter of... of You-Know-Who."

After discussion with Dumbledore, they decided that it was not necessary to hide her magic from Harry in the years prior to his attendance at Hogwarts, despite how much his aunt and uncle tried to deny it. But it was not until three years earlier, when Harry was only ten that she had told him the story of how James and Lily died. She knew it ought to have been earlier, but she never knew how to bring it up, even though she spoke of them often to him. Not until he had asked her directly what ever happened to them. But she did not tell him the whole story. She did not tell him of Sirius — she could not call him a traitor when she did not fully believe it. But now that he had broken out — especially because he had broken out — perhaps there was no choice but to accept it.