Saturday's Prophet had Sirius's acquittal across the front page. At breakfast, Ron asked what Hermione and I were doing that morning, and I told him my godfather was coming up to the castle at ten.
Ron's head turned straight down the table towards Seamus, and I didn't bother stopping him.
Seamus told everyone else, and by the time Hermione and I went out through the front doors at ten to ten, about thirty people had suddenly decided it was a lovely morning for a walk.
Most of them were hanging about at the top of the front steps, pretending to be very interested in the weather.
A few second-years had gone further and were sitting on the low wall beside the drive.
Anyone who didn't want to be caught staring was watching from the windows instead, and Fred and George had somehow got onto the top of the Astronomy Tower, where they had the best view in the castle and were almost certainly charging people for it.
Hermione and I went down the steps and stood at the end of the drive.
"They're going to stare at him," Hermione said.
"He's been stared at before," I replied. "Last time it was on wanted posters. This is an improvement."
Hermione glared at the second-years on the wall until one of them found something interesting in the other direction.
At ten o'clock exactly, the gates at the bottom of the drive swung open, and Sirius walked through them.
He was leading Buckbeak on a long rope. Somebody had cut his hair.
He was wearing proper robes, dark blue, that actually fitted, and he'd put on enough weight that his face didn't look like it was stretched over the bones anymore.
He walked up the drive slowly, and twice he stopped just to look up at the castle, while Buckbeak waited next to him with his head up like he'd been personally invited.
The Sirius I'd read about never got to do this. He spent his last year shut up in Grimmauld Place, going spare because he wasn't allowed out, and the first chance he got to be useful, he charged off to the Department of Mysteries and never came back.
This Sirius could walk through the front gates of Hogwarts in broad daylight with half the school watching, and go wherever he liked afterwards, which meant he was never going to get bored enough to do something that reckless.
When he reached us, he dropped Buckbeak's rope and hugged me so hard he lifted me off my feet, which was quite an achievement, considering how much I'd grown this year.
"Look at you," he said when he finally let go. "In daylight. Without a mirror."
"You've had a haircut."
"Kreacher did it." Sirius ran a hand through it. "He's been unbearably helpful since you gave him that locket. He polishes things I didn't know we owned. Yesterday he called me Master Sirius without spitting afterwards, and I nearly had to sit down."
Then he turned to Hermione and hugged her as well, and she went quite stiff for a second before she hugged him back.
Buckbeak had wandered off to investigate a flowerbed. I picked up his rope before he could eat it.
"You know he's still under a death sentence," Hermione said to Sirius, in a low voice, as soon as he'd let her go. "Officially. The Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures never cancelled it. He escaped."
"Ah," said Sirius. "About that."
He reached into his robes and took out a piece of parchment, folded twice, with the Ministry seal at the bottom.
"Fudge was in a very good mood yesterday," he explained. "There were a lot of photographers. While they were all still there, I asked him if he'd mind signing one more little thing, as a gesture of goodwill. He didn't read it very carefully."
Hermione took the parchment and read it twice.
"That's a full pardon," she said. "For a hippogriff."
"I thought Hagrid might like it."
We took Buckbeak down to Hagrid's. Hagrid was outside his cabin, doing something to a pumpkin with a watering can. He saw Buckbeak first, and then he saw who'd brought him, and the watering can landed on his foot without him noticing.
"Sirius Black," he said.
"Hello, Hagrid."
Hagrid didn't move. Fang, who'd come bounding out to meet us, stopped behind his legs.
Hagrid had been one of the last people to see Sirius before Azkaban, the night Voldemort came to Godric's Hollow, and ever since then he'd believed what everyone else had believed.
In the original Harry's memories, he'd called Sirius a traitor in the Three Broomsticks in third year with tears running into his beard.
Then Hagrid's eyes went to the parchment Hermione was holding out to him, and he read about half of it before he had to stop and blow his nose on a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth.
"I said things abou' yeh." His voice had gone thick. "After. I said a lot o' things."
"Everybody did," Sirius told him. "You'd have been a bit odd if you hadn't."
"I've still got yer bike." Hagrid wiped his eyes. "In the shed. Never knew what ter do with it. Didn' seem right ter sell it."
Sirius actually bounced on his toes. "The bike? It still works?"
"Couldn' tell yeh. Haven' had the heart ter try."
They were in the shed for twenty minutes. I could hear Sirius laughing from outside, and at one point something backfired, and Fang ran under the porch and refused to come out.
The last time I'd read about that bike, it had ended up in pieces in somebody's garden after a chase with half the Death Eaters in Britain. This time, the worst thing likely to happen to it was Sirius.
Afterwards, Hagrid wanted to give Buckbeak a proper look over, so I ended up holding the rope while Hagrid went over him from beak to tail, muttering about feathers.
Buckbeak put up with it, mostly because I'd bowed to him at the start, and partly because Hagrid kept feeding him dead ferrets out of a bucket.
From where I was standing, I could see the edge of the pumpkin patch. Sirius and Hermione had wandered over there while I was busy.
They were leaning on the fence, and Sirius was talking. For once, he wasn't waving his hands about. Hermione was nodding.
At one point she shook her head and said something short, and Sirius put his hand on her shoulder for a second.
"Good man, that," Hagrid said, following my eyes. "Always was. I should've known."
Dumbledore had asked to see Sirius and me after lunch, so once we'd eaten, Hermione went back down to Hagrid's, and Sirius and I went up to his office.
The gargoyle let us in without a password, which I suspected was for Sirius's benefit. He looked round the office like he'd last been in it at sixteen, and I'd have bet that wasn't far off.
"Last time I was up here," Sirius said, "it was about Snape and the Whomping Willow."
"I remember," said Dumbledore. "So, I suspect, does Severus. Please, sit down."
Sirius went a bit red, which was something I'd never seen before.
"Harry," Dumbledore said, once we were both settled. "I asked you here to talk about the summer, and there is something I ought to have told you a long time ago."
"When your mother died for you, she left a protection in your blood. As long as you could call the house where her sister lives your home, Lord Voldemort could not touch you there. That is why I have sent you back to Little Whinging every summer since you were a year old."
In the books, he'd told Harry all of this a year later, in a wrecked office, after Sirius was already dead. This time Sirius was sitting next to me, picking at a loose thread on his new robes.
"That's why I always had to go back," I said.
"It is." Dumbledore inclined his head. "And Lord Voldemort is gone. Which means I can no longer think of any good reason to send you back to Privet Drive, and Sirius has asked me, very firmly, whether you would like to live with him instead."
Sirius looked at the ceiling, very casually. His knee was bouncing.
"Yes," I said.
Sirius slapped the arm of his chair, and one of the silver instruments on the desk fell over.
"I'd thought you might say that," said Dumbledore. "There is one thing I would ask both of you to take seriously, though, before you start packing." He folded his hands on the desk.
"He may be gone, but a good number of the people who wore his Mark are not in Azkaban. Some of them have been very careful for fourteen years. They felt their Marks fade on Monday night, and most of them have no idea why. I would rather none of them worked it out. And I would rather that the house you live in was a good deal harder to walk into than the average London townhouse."
He wasn't wrong. Lucius Malfoy was still sitting in Wiltshire with a fortune and a lot of friends at the Ministry.
Avery, Nott, Macnair and the rest were walking about free as well, most of them having sworn blind in 1981 that they'd been under the Imperius.
None of them knew who'd done it, and I intended to keep it that way, but they didn't need to know for certain to want someone to blame.
"Grimmauld Place has more protective enchantments on it than Gringotts," said Sirius. "My mother was very keen on keeping people out."
"Your mother," said Dumbledore, "was very keen on keeping out Muggle-borns. I was thinking of something a little broader."
"I'll do the wards," I said.
Both of them looked at me.
"Over the summer," I explained. "The house is old, and old wards are strong. I'd rather add to what's there than pull it down and start again, but there are a few gaps in what the Blacks thought was dangerous, and I can fill those in. I'll show you what I've done before I finish, if you like, Professor."
Dumbledore picked up a quill and put it down again. He'd felt what I'd let out in the Riddle house on Monday.
"I would like that very much," he said. "And I will write to your aunt and uncle myself, to let them know the arrangements have changed."
"I don't think they'll argue," I said.
"I suspect your uncle will open a bottle of something," said Dumbledore, already reaching for a fresh piece of parchment.
We spent the rest of the afternoon at Hagrid's, and Buckbeak made it very clear that he wasn't leaving. By five o'clock he'd eaten so many ferrets that he'd lain down in the pumpkin patch and gone to sleep, and Hagrid was sitting next to him on an upturned bucket with one hand resting on his feathers.
We walked Sirius back down to the gates. He was wheeling the motorbike, and Hermione was arguing with him about whether a flying motorbike counted as a misused Muggle artefact.
Sirius said it wasn't a Muggle artefact anymore, and Hermione said that was exactly the sort of thing Mr Weasley's office spent all day dealing with.
At the gates, Sirius hugged me again, and then he swung a leg over the bike.
"End of term," he said. "Then you're out of here. And you," he added, pointing at Hermione, "are coming to visit. Bring your parents. I'll make Kreacher wear a tea towel without any holes in it."
"I'll ask them," Hermione said.
The bike started on the third kick. Sirius went roaring up over the trees towards Hogsmeade, and the noise faded a few seconds after he did.
We stood there for a bit after he'd gone.
"What did he say to you?" I asked. "By the pumpkins."
"He asked if I'd been sleeping," Hermione said. "I told him better than I was." She was still watching the trees where the bike had gone. "And then he asked if I knew how you do it. The Infinity and Gringotts."
"What did you tell him?"
"That I've been trying to work it out for months." She took my hand. "I haven't given up, either."
"I'd be worried if you had," I said, and we started back up the drive.
*
P@treon : Eternal97