Chapter 240 - Order of the Phoenix! Part-1

{15th July 1991} 

{Sirius's POV}

The iron gates of Hogwarts loomed like a memory I'd been trying not to have. Taller than fear, older than almost everything around, laced with runes that hummed in the bones as if the whole damned thing were a tuning fork held against the sky. I stood five paces around as I tried to think of a solution, hands itching to blast the bars into scrap, but knowing I would not be able to do a thing to them. It would have been a good, powerful explosion. And utterly pointless.

The wards crouched behind the metal like a great cat—patient, aware, perfectly willing to remove me if I took one step wrong. In term time, they tolerated unannounced visitors. In summer, with the castle quiet and the echoes folded up and stored on shelves, they were less forgiving. The sweep of them through my rudimentary mana sense told the story that they were primed with mana and ready to defend if needed.

I lifted my wand, half a thought from throwing a Patronus through the night, then caught myself. The letter. The resignation. Albus wasn't Headmaster anymore, not here, not behind those bars. I had followed the old familiar pattern—when in trouble, go to the Headmaster, go to Hogwarts, that's where the strongest wizard in England lived. What now? How am I supposed to reach him?

My mind reached back without asking permission and found reeling back to the war: mud on boots, rain steaming off dragonhide cloaks, the stink of cursed fire. It has gotten easier to handle these flashbacks with time, but I was thankful for this one as it reminded me of the taboo.

There had been a phrase, a ridiculous mouthful cobbled together by the order—tacky as sequins, considering we were in the middle of the war, but it was needed to keep us safe, and to make it harder to just guess it, we had to make it long. We'd joked about it until the first time it brought help fast enough to stop someone from dying. Since then, it had been another weapon against the Dark Lord. We never joked about it again after that. We hid it, because secrets are like birds: sing too loudly and they draw hawks. And then Peter sang it away to the Dark Lord, and the hawks came crashing down, we lost Dorcas in that attack, and the phrase was never used again.

I didn't have time for ghosts. I drew a breath, felt the old scar-tissue in my chest pull tight, and spoke to the summer air:

"Fawkes, assemble thee, guardian of light, protector of the Order of the Phoenix."

It sounded as overwrought as ever. But the moment the words left my mouth, the mana around the gate rang with a faint glassy twinge—a taboo jinx taking a note, a string plucked on a harp you couldn't see. The emotion tasted briefly of lemons and woodsmoke as I recalled leaving behind the body of a friend to help others escape. Relief came hard enough to sway me on my feet. If the taboo were still alive, they would come, especially since the Dark Lord is not active now.

I started counting heartbeats.

At twelve, a pop cracked the hedgerow, and a wand was already pointed between my eyes. I was pointing back, old instincts faster than politeness, but then the lamplight from the road caught a face patched together from old wars.

"Lower that," I said, looking warily at the shape of his name. "Mad-Eye."

Alastor Moody didn't lower anything. He leaned in instead, normal eye narrowed, the fake one rolling like a storm marble to take in hedge, field, clouds, the inside of my skull for all I know. The wand didn't waver. Then his mouth pulled into what for him passed as a grin: the corners tilted a degree, and the scars looked less like bad stitching.

"So it isn't an ambush, aye?" His voice was a gravel road with a good heart underneath. "Sirius, lad. Heard you were out of Azkaban. Good to see I wasn't too wrong to train you."

There was a flicker in my chest that hurt around the edges. "Depends whose assessment you're reading," I said. "Some in the ministry say I still shouldn't be allowed among the living."

"Ministry can kiss the back end of a hippogriff," he said, which, coming from him, was affection.

Before I could frame another sentence, another pop—cleaner, closer—announced a witch all angles and cool composure. Emmeline Vance stepped from the air in a dark cloak that made the night look underdressed. Her eyes did the same sweep Moody's had, precise, professional, and then cracked half a degree when she saw him.

"Alastor," she said, like a prayer she'd promised not to say aloud.

"Eyes up and around, Vance, Constant Vigilance," Moody growled, not unkindly, as the tilt in his smile became more pronounced as the night kept tearing seams. Another Pop. Kingsley Shacklebolt arrived wrapped in blue that caught the starlight, his head tipped as if he were listening to a frequency only he could hear. Pop. Another man, thinner than he had any right to be, stepped out into the dim light cast by the lamps on the gates.

Remus.

He wore the same battered coat I remembered from a dozen kitchen tables and midnight walks. His hair was longer, threaded with more colour I didn't know how to name. His face had gone spare, the way faces do when meals are a maybe. He looked like an old book someone had loved and left in the sun. His eyes found mine, and he did a careful thing that wasn't quite a smile, as he nodded very slightly.

Every muscle in my shoulders wanted to make a mess of the moment to move forward and hug the old bastard. Instead, I nodded once, the gesture you use at funerals so you don't break anything. We would talk, but not now, and turned half a step to look around.

"Come on then," Moody said to the air. "Out with it, Dumbledore seems to be busy, so we might as well help."

"I—"

The iron gate unlatched itself with the peculiar dignity of objects that have never seen a muddy footprint. It swung inward on silent hinges, and framed in the path's darkness came a figure I would have recognized at a thousand paces, in a blizzard, with a bag over my head. Minerva. Wrapped in robes most days, tonight she arrived in a traveling cloak and a look that could staple a dragon to a wall.

Wand in hand, spectacles glinting, she approached at a pace that was not a run because Minerva McGonagall does not run, she glided. The light from the road caught her eyes and, for a heartbeat, they were a cat's—twin green coins that remembered better nights.

"Sirius," she breathed my name. There were so many emotions in her tone that I didn't try to dismantle them, and if she was about to say something after that, it drowned in the sound of crinkling hedges made as the world folded in on itself and put itself back on with all the buttons off by one.

I felt the arrival before the flames got around to it. The wards eased, made space for their master even though he shouldn't have access to them anymore. Then the night tore in red and gold, hot and heavy, and Fawkes arrived the way summer blasts you in the face: silently and too beautifully to hold a grudge against. He flamed into being and brought with him a man who does not step so much as exist in the place he means to be.

Albus Dumbledore stood in the road with firelight cinched around his shoulders like a cloak. Fawkes settled, arrogant with grace, upon that shoulder and shook once, scattering sparks that weren't sparks at all but something like laughter. The old wizard looked around his eyes, taking in the faces of everyone around. Not long after his eyes found my face, and there was none of the stuff people know him for—the twinkle, the mischief, the kindly twaddle. There was a very bright mind, wide awake, and the weight of history standing behind it like a quiet mountain.

"What happened, Sirius?"

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