Sirius Black had been distracted all afternoon because of what had happened a few hours earlier.
Just after Draco and Harry had gone upstairs, a conversation had taken place in the long, dark entrance hall of Grimmauld Place that Sirius was still turning over in his mind.
"Sirius, this place is a complete disgrace." Narcissa had looked around the hallway with the expression of a woman who suspected the air itself might be harmful. She turned her gaze to the gaunt, dark-haired man before her, allowing a thin smile onto her face. "The noble Black family, reduced to this. I wonder whether Aunt Walburga's soul rests easy, knowing what's become of her carefully maintained home."
"If you'd heard her swearing at us through those curtains, you might not be quite so worried about her soul." Sirius glanced toward the velvet drapes at the end of the corridor. A low, rhythmic rumbling suggested she was, for the moment, asleep.
"She always was determined," Narcissa said, with the composure of someone who has grown up surrounded by difficult women.
"All right, enough." Sirius crossed his arms. "You didn't come here to discuss my mother's character. What do you actually want, Narcissa?"
"I want to know how you survived Azkaban without losing your mind," she said plainly.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Yes, you do. Eleven years in Azkaban and you're still coherent — barely, perhaps, but coherent. Bellatrix went in at her full power and came out half-mad. You were in there for over a decade and you can hold a conversation. I don't believe that happened by accident." She moved with deliberate composure through the dusty hallway. "And I want to know how Pettigrew managed to evade the Dementors while he was hiding."
Sirius stared at her for a moment. Then he let out a short, genuine laugh.
How extraordinary. The people in this house who most urgently wanted to know how Peter Pettigrew had slipped past the Dementors were all here at this very moment — and none of them knew it.
"You think it's funny?" Narcissa looked at him coolly.
"I think it's something," he said. He studied her with his grey eyes, the laugh fading into something more measured. "All right. I do have an answer. But it's worth something — it's the difference between surviving the Dementors and not. I'm not giving it away for free."
Narcissa's expression did not change, but something in her posture became more careful. "What do you want?"
"While I was in Azkaban, my cell was next to Bellatrix's. She said things — not often, and not clearly, but she said them." Sirius kept his voice even. "She mentioned a golden cup. Said it was keeping something safe. Said he couldn't die as long as it existed." He paused. "I need that cup. I believe it's in the Lestrange vault at Gringotts."
"You're dreaming," Narcissa said immediately.
"Then I keep my secret." He toyed with his wand. "Your choice."
"Only Bellatrix can open that vault."
"You're her key custodian, Narcissa. You've been sending things to Azkaban for her for years." He held her gaze, unblinking. "I lived next door to her for eleven years. Did you think I wouldn't notice?"
A hairline fracture appeared in Narcissa's composure.
Sirius pressed on, his voice dropping into something almost conversational. "Your uncle must find it difficult. His eldest in Azkaban. His second daughter gone — eloped with a Muggle-born, of all things, the one Black family scandal that couldn't be quietly managed. And then there's you. His good daughter. The obedient one. Visiting him, taking care of things. Visiting Bellatrix when you can, keeping her affairs in order." He tilted his head. "It's a great deal of loyalty, for a family that doesn't always deserve it."
"That is none of your concern." Her voice was steel.
"I'll throw in the Black family's gold interests in Peru," Sirius said, shifting smoothly. "Transfer them to you. All I want is the cup."
"You're threatening the mother of the boy who freed you from Azkaban," Narcissa said quietly. The disbelief in her expression was real. "Draco gave you back your freedom, and this is how you—"
"Oh, come off it. The Black family has never run on sentiment, and you know it." He nodded toward the wall of the sitting room above them, where his name had been burned into the tapestry years ago. "Positions and interests. That's what we operate on." He let a beat pass. "And perhaps Peter Pettigrew's target was never your son at all. Perhaps it was always Harry."
Narcissa went still.
"I haven't told Harry this," Sirius added. "Not yet. And I can't promise forever. But I'll hold it until we've reached an agreement."
"Are you so confident in your godson's safety that you'd leave him exposed?" she asked, with the precise calm of someone applying pressure at exactly the right point.
"Pettigrew hid for two years and never made a move. He could have acted at any moment and didn't." Sirius's voice was steady, though something beneath it wasn't. "Your son is the one who exposed him. If there's genuine hatred being nursed somewhere — that's the direction it points."
They looked at each other for a long moment.
"The cup," Narcissa said finally, her voice low. "I've seen the vault records. It's warded — a Flagrante curse and a Gemino charm. Anything that touches it multiplies and burns. Whatever it is, Bellatrix went to considerable lengths to protect it." She held his gaze. "That tells me it matters."
Sirius said nothing.
"All right." Narcissa's chin lifted by a fraction. "I'll collect it before I lose my nerve. While I'm gone — clean this place up. And tell Draco not to touch anything suspicious." She cast a last withering look at the hallway and turned toward the door.
"Yes, ma'am," Sirius said.
She swept out. The door closed behind her. And the moment it did, Sirius's composure left him entirely.
He paced the length of the hall, trying to slow his breathing, thinking about what Bellatrix had muttered through eleven years of prison walls.
My master's golden cup. I'm keeping it safe. As long as it exists, he won't die — he'll come back to me.
He had first heard her say it years into their imprisonment, during a particularly bad stretch when the Dementors were making their circuits and the entire block had descended into a misery that was difficult to describe. He'd assumed, at the time, that it was the kind of raving that all of them were prone to eventually. Azkaban produced exactly that — it stripped out everything clear and left only the worst and the most obsessive.
But Bellatrix's Occlumency was exceptional. She was damaged, yes — the Dementors had taken something from her that she would never recover — but there was always a thread of focus in her madness that didn't belong to delirium. A certain specific quality to that claim.
He hadn't thought to take it seriously until much later. Until freedom, and clear air, and the ability to think in straight lines again.
And then Narcissa's reaction, just now, had confirmed it. The cup was real. Whatever it was, whatever it meant, it was real.
Even a small thing that could help Voldemort return was something Sirius intended to put out of reach. Whatever the cost.
He stopped pacing and stared at the closed front door, and set his jaw, and waited.
───────────────────────────────────────────
"Sirius."
Harry's voice. Sirius pulled himself back to the present and found himself seated at the long table in the basement kitchen, which he did not remember walking into.
The room had been transformed. Every surface was gleaming — silver cutlery polished to a mirror finish, porcelain so clean it reflected the candlelight. Down the length of the table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops, lamb chops, sausages, roasted potatoes in their jackets. At the far end, an apple tart, chocolate muffins, fried jam doughnuts, and rice pudding.
Dobby stood at attention beside the table in a pristine white chef's uniform — complete with a tall white hat — watching them with an expression of quivering, nervous pride.
"Dobby, this is extraordinary," Harry said, leaning forward to look at the spread. "Why don't you sit with us?"
The effect on Dobby was immediate and total. His enormous eyes filled. His chin trembled. "Oh, great Harry Potter," he managed, in a voice that suggested he was in genuine physical distress from the honour. "Harry Potter's praise alone is more than Dobby could ever deserve — to sit at the same table as Harry Potter — Dobby cannot accept—" He blew his nose on his hat and vanished with a loud crack.
"You frightened him," Draco said, setting down the book he'd been examining — the Black family genealogy, a heavy volume Sirius had been using to deal with the silver cutlery earlier. He gave it one more glance: near the back, someone had drawn a symbol in the margin in old ink. A vertical line, a triangle, a circle. He filed it away.
Harry stared at the space where Dobby had been. "I only invited him to eat."
"House-elves are trained to find that sort of thing mortifying," Sirius said, serving himself with the automatic elegance of someone who'd grown up with seven courses and hadn't entirely lost the habit. It looked peculiar on his gaunt frame — like seeing an old habit of a person who no longer quite existed. "Kreacher's the same. Though Kreacher's motivations are rather different."
"Why not give him clothes and let him go?" Harry asked. "Dobby told me that's how it works — you give them clothes and they're free."
"Because Kreacher knows too many of the family's secrets." Sirius took a measured sip of his drink. "And because, truly, he doesn't want to leave. His dearest ambition is to have his head mounted on that wall upstairs when he dies. Same as his predecessors."
Harry and Draco looked at each other.
"Bit morbid," Harry said finally, cutting into a sausage.
"You have your mother's instincts." Sirius said it quietly, looking at Harry with something that was not quite a smile.
"Was she — were people fond of her?" Harry asked carefully, as he always did when the subject came up, as though afraid of breaking something.
"Lily Evans was the most popular girl at Hogwarts in our year," Sirius said, with simple certainty. "By a considerable margin." He was still thinking about the cup; it was visible in his distraction. "She had that quality — people wanted to be around her."
"I heard," Draco said, in the careful, offhand way he used when he wanted to introduce something without appearing to, "that she and Professor Snape were close. Before Hogwarts."
Harry's fork stopped moving.
Sirius looked up. His expression went through several changes in rapid succession.
"That greasy, self-important—" He set down his glass. "They grew up in the same town. He was obsessed with her from the moment they met, and she was kind to him because that was her nature. And then he called her a Mudblood in front of half the school, and that was that." He said it with the contempt of someone who had watched the situation unfold and found it wholly unsurprising. "He crawled back afterwards, naturally. Showed up looking wretched and apologised. Lily didn't take him back. I wouldn't have either."
"I expect he regrets it," Draco said, refilling Sirius's glass with quiet efficiency.
"He ought to." Sirius glanced at Harry, his expression shifting again into something more direct. "He's never forgiven your father, you know. James made his life difficult at school, and Snape has an exceptionally long memory. And you look like James. Same face, same build — only your eyes are your mother's."
Harry said nothing. He had the slightly dazed expression of someone receiving information they'd wanted for a long time and weren't entirely sure what to do with.
"He gives you a hard time," Sirius said. It wasn't a question.
Harry gave a single, non-committal nod.
"If it becomes more than that, tell me." Sirius said it lightly, but meant it. "I'll deal with it."
───────────────────────────────────────────
Narcissa returned in the late afternoon.
She was pale, and she was carrying a wrapped parcel. She said nothing as Sirius led her into the freshly cleaned sitting room on the second floor. She looked around it with brief, surprised approval, then sat.
"Close the door," she said. He did.
"It's in here." She set the parcel on the table between them, her expression tight. "Before I give it to you — the agreement."
He slid a signed parchment across the table. She read it without hurrying, and then nodded. "This is acceptable."
He reached for the parcel. She moved it back, fractionally.
"Tell me first."
Sirius settled into the chair across from her. "It's not a complicated answer. When I was in Azkaban, I stayed sane because I could transform." He held her gaze. "A dog. The Dementors sense human emotion — despair, hope, memory, all of it. That's what they feed on. In my Animagus form, my emotional register was simpler. Harder to grip. They could still affect me, but not in the same way. I could retreat into that form when it became unbearable, and it gave me enough relief to survive the rest."
Narcissa stared at him.
"You're already aware that Pettigrew's Animagus form was a rat," Sirius continued. "The same principle applies. Small animal, simpler emotional signature. The Dementors would have had very little purchase on him."
The silence in the room went on for several seconds.
"That's—" She stopped.
"Obvious, once you know to look for it." He shrugged. "Yes. Most people don't think to look." He extended his hand. "Now."
Narcissa looked at him a moment longer. Then, wordlessly, she opened the parcel.
The cup inside was solid gold — two fine handles, intricate carvings running around the rim and down the sides. Even sitting on the table between them in the dusty sitting room at Grimmauld Place, it had a quality of deliberate beauty that seemed wrong for the setting.
Sirius stared at it. He did not touch it.
"Don't speak of this to anyone," Narcissa said. She tucked the transfer documents into her bag and stood. "Not a word of how I obtained it, and not a word about today."
"Agreed." He was still looking at the cup.
She gave him one last, assessing look, and went upstairs to find Draco.