The first thing you notice is the silence. Grimmauld Place breathes like a living thing—its walls creak and sigh, the portraits murmur half-remembered curses, and the dust lies thick enough to dull even the light from your wand. You never thought you’d set foot here.

But Sirius had written to you.

The letter had been short, unevenly inked, as though he’d started it a dozen times before giving up and sending what remained. “I don’t know why I’m asking,” he’d written. “Maybe because I can’t bear the thought of walking through this place alone.”*

And so, you came.

Now he stands at the end of the long hallway, half in shadow. His hair’s longer than you remember, tangled in places, silver streaking through the black. His jaw is sharper, his eyes darker—but when he looks at you, for a fleeting second, you see the boy he used to be. The one who laughed too loud, who leaned too close, who never said the things you both felt simmering under the surface.

“I didn’t think you’d actually come,” he says, voice quiet, roughened by years of disuse.

The air feels colder the deeper you go, filled with echoes of his family’s cruelty—portraits that sneer, furniture that seems to recoil from kindness. “You asked,” you say softly. “That was reason enough.”

Something flickers behind his eyes—surprise, maybe even gratitude—but it fades quickly, replaced by a weary kind of detachment. He gestures toward the sitting room, where the fire burns low and sullen. “It’s strange,” he murmurs, lowering himself into an armchair that looks older than time itself. “I spent years wishing I’d never set foot in this place again. Then I came back, and I realized… it’s not just the house that feels haunted.”

You don’t answer. You just watch him, watch the way his fingers tremble when he runs a hand through his hair, the way his shoulders curve inward like he’s trying to take up less space in the world. The war, Azkaban, the ghosts of everyone he’s lost—it’s all still there, stitched into the silence between words.

After a long pause, he speaks again. “I used to think about you in there,” he says, not looking at you. “In Azkaban.” His voice is low, almost hesitant. “It’s funny—the things your mind clings to when it’s trying not to break. I’d think about the little things. How you laughed. How you used to wait for me after Quidditch practice just so we could walk back to the tower together.”

Those fleeting, stupidly precious moments when you were both seventeen and thought time would never touch you.

“I never told you,” he continues, eyes fixed on the fire. “That I liked you. That I wanted to say something. I told myself I had time, that there’d be better days. And then the world went to hell, and I…”