The Boy who died - Ready for Anything

Sirius Black

Welcome to "In Omnia Paratus - Ready for anything"

The main characters will be:

Bella Black (OC), Veatrix Lestrange (OC), Parvati Patil, Hermione Granger, Ariana Clarks (OC)

Other important characters:

James Rivers (OC), Oliver Rivers, Cat-Lee Miller (OC),  Zane Blishwick (OC), Ginn Tonks (OC), Padma Patil, Ginny Weasley, Fred and George Weasley

And of course, most of the already known characters will appear throughout the story. The narrative perspective will change repeatedly throughout the chapters.

POV of Evaney Petrova (Bella Black's Mum)

The Potters were dead. Had been for many years. I still couldn't believe it; it all seemed so unreal. I knew Lily. I met her when I started an internship at St. Mungo's after graduating from Durmstrang. I always perceived her as a kind-hearted person. Naturally, she quickly became my best friend. She was also the one who introduced me to Sirius Black. The unique charm of the almost shamelessly handsome, dark-haired, and gray-eyed young man quickly captivated me. Never before had I fallen head over heels for someone like that.

My life was practically perfect. After a successful internship at St. Mungo's, I had now begun my training as a Healer there.

Back then, I saw the world differently than I do today. Through rose-colored glasses, as if there was no evil in the world. As if the ongoing war wasn't real. It didn't affect me. Until one day, Sirius, Lily, and her husband James revealed to me that they belonged to the Order of the Phoenix. This was a secret society actively resisting He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. I admired the three for their courage and considered joining as well.

But that became irrelevant just a few days later when I found out I was unexpectedly pregnant. Sirius and I hadn't been dating for long at that point and hadn't discussed our future. Had we talked about it, my answer certainly wouldn't have been that I planned to become a mother in my early 20s. Someday, sure. But not while I was still in the middle of my Healer training. And certainly not while a war was raging, which had become much more real to me since I knew my friends were actively involved in it.

I was afraid of what the pregnancy meant for my future. So Lily, as my best friend, was the first person I confided in. I remember exactly how overjoyed she seemed when she revealed that she was pregnant too. How hopelessly optimistic could one be? Her joy was so genuine. But this joy was followed by sobering reality when I told Sirius about it. He reacted dismissively and blocked all my attempts to contact him for two weeks before I finally saw him again. During that time, I made the decision that I would keep the child. With or without his support.

As it turned out after those two weeks, Sirius had gotten cold feet and sought advice from his best friend James. He had apparently given Sirius quite a talking-to and incomprehensibly explained to him that it was perfect that they were becoming fathers at the same time. Something about the next generation of Marauders and so on...

Somehow James had convinced him, because Sirius returned to me. And when our daughter Bella was born, Sirius was an unexpectedly proud father. I should have known better then. But I so desperately wished for a happy family for our daughter. So much so that I was apparently too blind to see what the person I was living with was capable of.

No one could say with absolute certainty what happened on that fateful autumn night a year later, but everyone knew the result: A family of three lost their lives, and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named seemed to have fallen.

The thought that Harry, Lily and James's son, would now be starting Hogwarts together with Bella if all this had never happened, brought a single silent tear down my cheek. After all these years, I still wasn't quite sure what to believe. There were rumors that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had died as well, and others that he had merely been stripped of his power, which was why we had been living in peace for almost 10 years now... The only certainty was that some of his former followers were still at large..

Unlike the father of my daughter. Sirius had vanished without a trace that same night, without any warning, without leaving a message. For 24 hours, I was sick with worry, desperately seeking advice from Bella's godfather Remus Lupin, before Ministry officials showed up at my door and summoned me for an interrogation. Sirius was accused of betraying the whereabouts of our best friends to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. It was also said that he had killed Peter Pettigrew, another school friend who had tried to confront him, and 12 Muggles in an explosion.

I was in shock as I watched the father of my daughter on the defendant's bench. I barely recognized him. He seemed so foreign to me as I noticed the emptiness in his eyes that normally radiated pure joy for life. But none of that and the warmth I usually felt when I looked at him seemed to remain. It broke my heart to see him like this. As much as I wanted to believe that he hadn't done any of these things, it had to be true. I knew that Lily and James had talked about making him the sole Secret-Keeper of their whereabouts a few weeks earlier. They had known they were in mortal danger since Dumbledore had told them about this one prophecy concerning their son and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

The trial, if you could even call it that since it was quite one-sided, didn't last very long. Sirius didn't deny a single one of the charges. He didn't say anything at all. To me, he seemed broken. He just sat there with his head bowed until they led him away after announcing the verdict. Life imprisonment in Azkaban.

For days afterward, I didn't leave the apartment. I functioned because I owed that to Bella as a mother. But eventually, I couldn't bear it anymore. Everything in this apartment reminded me that I had lived here with a now convicted murderer. One last time, I met Remus to say goodbye before leaving the country with Bella. We returned to my family in Bulgaria. Hoping for a normal life. We lived there for 6 years before I had a falling out with my parents. I had never been able to please them, but finding out what they really thought of me was painful. In their eyes, I was a disgrace to the family as a single mother anyway. I had never told them what had happened to Bella's father or who he even was. The events surrounding the fall of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had spread to Bulgaria as well, but hardly anyone there knew the name of Sirius Black, whose surname Bella still bore, and his role in the events. And that was a good thing.

Perhaps it had been a rash decision to return to London, but I haven't regretted it to this day. I quickly got a part-time job at St. Mungo's, which allowed me to afford a small apartment on the outskirts of London for Bella and me. Once I had regained my footing, I sent an owl to Remus, with whom I had kept in touch over the past years. In it, I informed him about our return and asked for a meeting. Even though Bella had no memories of her godfather anymore, she immediately took him to her heart, which further confirmed to me that it had been the right decision to return. And now, almost four years later, her first day at Hogwarts was just around the corner.