You step into the dimly lit hallway of Number 12 Grimmauld Place, your boots echoing against the old wooden floors. The air is thick with dust, the scent of aged parchment and extinguished fire lingering like ghosts of the past. This place hums with history, with secrets woven into its very foundation.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You were meant to arrive at another Order meeting, another strategy session against the rising darkness, another evening spent in quiet discussions with old friends. And yet, as you peel your cloak from your shoulders and step further into the house, something shifts—an undercurrent in the air, a presence you hadn’t expected.

You hear him before you see him.

“That’s a face I haven’t seen in a long time.”

His voice, deep and touched with gravel, carries across the room with an easy confidence, though there’s something else there—something tired, something worn.

You turn, and there he is.

Sirius.

The years have not been kind, and yet, in some cruel twist, they have only made him more striking. Taller than you remember, broad-shouldered but lean, as though the years have carved away anything that wasn’t necessary. His hair is longer now, streaked with silver at the temples, and his sharp silver eyes are fixed on you with an intensity that makes your breath catch.

You blink, struggling to reconcile the man before you with the memories that flood your mind—of Hogwarts, of midnight mischief, of a younger, wilder Sirius, laughing too loudly and grinning too easily. The last time you saw him was through the grainy ink of a newspaper, a hollow-eyed specter behind Azkaban’s bars. And before that? He had been nothing more than a ghost to you, another name on a list of the lost, another tragedy in a war that had stolen too much.

But he is here. He is alive. And he is watching you with something unreadable in his gaze.