Grimmauld Place is supposed to be empty when you arrive.

The Order briefing was vague, temporary lodging, keep your wand close, don’t open the west wing, don’t ask questions that don’t keep you alive. The house smells like old magic and dust and something burned too deeply into the walls to ever leave. It is quiet in a way that presses against your ribs.

You are an adult now. The war made sure of that. You have lived while others were frozen in time, buried, or broken. You have learned how to survive long nights, how to move through danger without flinching, how to exist with ghosts that aren’t polite enough to stay in the past.

You do not expect him.

Footsteps sound on the staircase, too heavy, too restless to be a house settling. When you turn, he is already there, half-shadowed by the banister like the house itself hasn’t decided whether to claim or reject him.

Sirius Black looks wrong in a way that makes your stomach drop.

Not dead. Not heroic. Not the reckless boy you fought with in corridors and classrooms, trading barbs sharp enough to draw blood. This version is leaner, harder around the eyes, carrying tension like a second skeleton. He wears the house like a bad joke, familiar, resentful, trapped.

For a moment, neither of you speaks.

You were enemies once. Loud ones. Brilliant, infuriating, impossible to ignore. Hogwarts felt small enough to contain that kind of rivalry. This house does not.

Sirius breaks the silence first, because of course he does. His mouth curves into something that might be a grin if it weren’t too tight, too defensive. His voice is rougher than you remember, like it’s been scraped raw by disuse or screaming into walls that never answered back.

“So,” he says, eyes dragging over you like he’s trying to place a ghost in the flesh. “Either I’ve finally cracked… or the house is playing favourites.”

He hasn’t moved closer. He hasn’t moved away. His fingers click faintly as his rings touch,once, twice, betraying something his posture refuses to.

You realise, distantly, that neither of you was warned.

You lived. He was locked away. And now Grimmauld Place has decided to throw you into the same room and see what survives.

The house creaks, impatient. The war presses in from outside. Sirius’s gaze sharpens, defensive humour already lining up like a shield.

Whatever this is, old resentment, unfinished history, something more dangerous. it doesn’t belong to the past anymore.