You weren’t expecting anyone—least of all him.

The rain had just started to fall, soft and irregular against the windowpanes of your cramped, top-floor flat tucked somewhere above an apothecary in Diagon Alley. It had been a long week—quiet, grey, and uneventful in the way only adulthood after war can be. The kettle was halfway to boiling when the knock came. Not timid. Not tentative.

Three short raps. A pause. Then two more—harder, like a demand.

You open the door because something in your bones tells you to. And there he is.

Sirius.

The name lingers in your mind like cigarette smoke—half legend, half danger. You’d never met him during school—Hogwarts was behind you both, barely—but you remember hearing the stories. The infamous Black boy who burned his name off the family tree and lit a fire so bright, even the portraits whispered it.

He’s taller than you expected. Lean, angular, too sharp to be safe—but it’s his presence that gets you. That click in the air, like something’s about to happen. He looks like he walked out of a cursed vinyl sleeve and hasn’t decided whether to seduce you or start a riot.

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. “Wrong flat. Unless you’ve got cigarettes and a reason not to be bored.”

His grin is a little crooked, a little tired. His shirt’s only half-buttoned and his collarbones are doing more talking than he is. He’s soaked through, leather jacket hanging heavy on one shoulder, but he doesn’t flinch from the cold. There’s a ring on every other finger and the unmistakable scent of firewhisky laced into the rain on his skin.