HARRY POTTER STORY: Lions in snake den

Part 39

The doors of the Ministry of Magic had never felt so heavy.

Or perhaps, Harry thought, they simply felt heavier when you were walking out of them rather than into them. There was a difference between the weight of anticipation and the weight of relief. One pressed down on the chest like a stone. The other was almost dizzying — a sudden absence of something you had carried so long you had forgotten what it felt like not to bear it.

He pushed through the last set of doors, and the grey London sky opened above him.

Beside him, Sirius stopped walking.

Just stopped completely still on the stone steps as if his legs had simply forgotten what to do with themselves now that there was no longer anywhere they were required to be. No Ministry corridor to pace. No courtroom to stand in. No fugitive's paranoia whispering to keep moving, keep low, don't be seen.

He tilted his head back and looked up at the sky.

It was, objectively, an unremarkable sky. The kind London produced most mornings in late summer pale grey clouds streaked through with patches of washed-out blue, the sun doing its best from somewhere behind them. Not dramatic. Not triumphant. Just sky.

Sirius stared at it like it was the most extraordinary thing he had ever seen.

Harry watched him, saying nothing. Hermione had come to stand at his left shoulder, her arm brushing his, and Remus had stopped a step behind them both, giving Sirius the space he needed without withdrawing entirely. The four of them stood there on the Ministry steps while the city breathed around them taxi horns, pigeons, the distant grind of the Underground and nobody spoke.

It was Sirius who finally broke the silence, and when he did, his voice was rougher than usual.

"I forgot what it smells like," he said. "Outside. Properly outside." He inhaled slowly, deliberately. "Rain. Exhaust fumes. Someone's chips from a stall around the corner." A pause. "Terrible. Absolutely terrible." He lowered his head, and there were the beginnings of a grin at the corners of his mouth, but his eyes were too bright for it to be entirely a joke. "Merlin, I've missed it."

Harry felt something tighten in his throat. He stepped up beside his godfather, close enough that their shoulders touched, and looked out at the grey London street with him.

"You're free," Harry said quietly. Not a reminder. Just the shape of the truth, spoken aloud between them where it could finally be real.

Sirius turned his head to look at him. The grin softened into something that had no easy name something between pride and grief and the particular ache of love that has survived things it shouldn't have had to.

"Because of you," Sirius said simply.

"Because of the truth," Harry corrected.

Sirius shook his head slightly. "Because you made them listen to it." He reached out and gripped Harry's shoulder a firm, solid grip, the kind that said I see you clearly and I'm not letting go and Harry let himself lean into it, just fractionally, just enough.

Hermione appeared at Sirius's other side, and without ceremony or announcement, she slipped her hand through the crook of his arm. Sirius glanced down at her, surprised for just a moment before his expression settled into something warm and almost disbelieving as though he still hadn't fully adjusted to the reality of her, this sister that Harry had found and who had made the Potter name feel like something inhabited again rather than simply inherited.

"You were brilliant in there," she said, and it wasn't directed at Harry this time. "The way you answered every question. You didn't flinch once."

"Well," Sirius said, and the old roguish edge was back in his voice, though softened at the edges, "I've had fourteen years of practice deciding exactly what I'd say if anyone ever bothered to ask." The lightness faltered slightly. "Fourteen years is a long time to rehearse."

Hermione's grip on his arm tightened without a word.

Remus came to stand beside them at last, his hands settled in his coat pockets, his expression the careful, contained thing it always was but his eyes, when they met Sirius's, said everything he wouldn't say in front of anyone else. Harry had long since learned to read Remus Lupin in the spaces between his words. The relief there was profound and old and not entirely without its own shadow of guilt for the years he hadn't pushed harder, hadn't fought louder, hadn't done what was now being done. Harry had seen that guilt in him before and chose not to name it today.

Today wasn't for guilt. Today was for this.

"Pub?" Remus suggested, his voice mild.

Sirius let out a short, genuine laugh — the first one Harry had heard from him that didn't carry any shadow underneath it. The sound of it was so ordinary and unguarded that it felt almost startling, like hearing a song you'd half-forgotten.

"Remus," he said, "that is the most sensible thing you have said in thirty years."