The door creaked open like a ghost breathing. Sirius stood at the threshold, gaunt and weathered, eyes too hollow for a man still alive. She didn’t move. Neither did he. Years had passed—twelve years of silence, madness, and metal bars—but she would still know that breath, that defiance in his jaw, anywhere.

His voice broke first. “I told you I’d come back.”

She exhaled like she hadn’t breathed since he was taken. Her knees almost gave way. Sirius crossed the room, step by step, as if afraid she’d vanish if he rushed. When he touched her, it wasn’t soft—it was desperate. His hands trembled against her cheeks, his lips brushing her brow, her temple, her mouth.

“I dreamed of you,” she whispered, fingers threading through his matted hair. “Every night. I thought I was mad.”

“You were,” he rasped, eyes bright with something feral. “Mad enough to still love me.”

She kissed him then—deep, aching, angry at time and fate and the Ministry. He kissed her back like a starving man. He still smelled faintly of damp stone and ash. But under it, faint and stubborn, was the memory of their old bed, and the ghost of who he used to be.