The Long Road Home

At first, it was like falling, but not, and like dreaming, but not, because if it had been either or both he would have had a sense of anticipation. Instead, it was a constant and unyielding shift through darkness. Legs and arms and stomach and face tingling with the effects of the Stunning Spell, Sirius clawed for walls but touched nothing. After a long time he remembered that he had been clutching his wand when he slid through the veil, but now he couldn't feel it in his hands. They'd taken his wand from him once, years ago, and he had never seen it again. At least it isn't cold, he thought. Azkaban had always been cold. Later, whenever things were bad, Remus would rub Sirius's hands and tell him that things were better, because at least they were warm.

Remus: the one he could never stop thinking of, even when the only thoughts he could have were of betrayal and pain. Remus: the one he loved--not more than he loved James or Harry, but differently, in a way that demanded that neither love another the same way. Remus, who he had last seen dueling in the dark chamber with the quiet intensity that--

What if he was wounded? What if Bellatrix used Avada Kedavra on him, or Crucio? And those thoughts tethered him, kept him sane. The familiarity of despair washed over him, reminded him of the last time he'd needed to cling to sanity.

Then, just as unexpectedly as it had begun, it was over. Without any sense of movement, Sirius was suddenly staring up at the gentle glow of a hundred candles. After a few seconds of disorientation and a brief yellow flash, he realized that he was lying on his back, and shot into a crouch, ready to defend himself. The first thing he saw was the veil, its tattered material fluttering eerily, and then he heard a voice and spun to face a line of red-robed wizards and witches. They each held a sheet of parchment in one hand and a quill in the other, and they were all writing. Sirius straightened up, still too wary for fear. One of the witches followed his movement with wide eyes and Sirius wondered if they had come to take him back to Azkaban. Where is Moony? he thought, and then fear came, like a shadow passing across the sun, and made his fingers tingle.

"What is your name?" one of the wizards asked. "When did you die?"

Sirius backed toward the veil and pressed his hands against the dais. "I'm not dead."

The wide-eyed witch's face softened and she asked, "What is the last thing you remember? What date was it?"

Sirius stared at her. His heart beat painfully hard against his ribcage, and he told her automatically. He still kept count of the days in his head, as he had taught himself to do in Azkaban: so that he never lost track of time, so that he always knew when the full moon came.

She frowned and wrote something on her parchment. Murmurs of "Unexpected," "Something wrong," and "How can that be?" filled the chamber, and Sirius reached up and caught the cloth just to hold onto something solid.

"Please don't do that," one of the wizards said, stepping forward and taking Sirius's arm. "There's a good man, come with me. I imagine you're quite confused."

Sirius shook him off. "Who are you?"

"Elias Goodwin, experimental magical theorist." The man's hands were back on Sirius's arm, firm and leading him away from the veil. "We'd just like to interview you, Mr....?"

"Lupin," Sirius whispered. "James Lupin." He was disoriented and frightened, but he knew he could not give them his real name, or they would send him back to prison. Why don't they recognize me? My picture was everywhere...

"Delighted, Mr. Lupin. You're part of a very exciting experiment, and if you'll sit here, I'll explain it all to you." Goodwin led him out into a main chamber, circular shaped, with doors lining the walls, and then through one of the doors and into a well-lit office. He waved a long, thin wand and a stiff-backed chair appeared. Sirius did not sit.

"What experiment?" he asked instead, folding his hands inside his robe and feeling the empty spot where he usually kept his wand.

Goodwin sat behind the desk and drew out an architect's drawing of the veil, covered in runes and numbers. "It's quite interesting that you came through on the same day as you left. Also that you didn't realize you'd died--most people remember that they were killed before they--"

"I'm not dead," Sirius said through gritted teeth. "What experiment?"

"Oh," the other wizard replied, a startled look on his face. "These things can be hard to accept, I realize, but you must be dead, or you wouldn't have fallen through the veil."

"I was hit with a Stunning Spell. I fell into it because it was behind me." Sirius struggled to remember those final moments--everything had been so chaotic--but Bellatrix's spell hadn't killed him, some bit of the family loyalty remained and she hadn't thought to use Avada Kedavra. He'd only fallen backwards when Stunned--he couldn't be dead--

Goodwin shook his head. "This is awkward," he said, and he looked it. "Usually I don't have to explain this to those who come through, because they understand how it works."

Sirius was numb. "No, I don't understand."

The witch who had been staring at him when he first came through entered the office and slammed the door. "What are you telling him?" she demanded.

Goodwin raised his eyebrows in obvious annoyance. "I was about to explain the nature of the veil, if you don't mind."

She shook her head and turned to Sirius. "Your name was Lupin?"

He nodded. "Right."

She crossed the office and lifted a slim book from under two much thicker books titled Advanced Magical Objects: Not As Benign As They Look and Muggle Quantum Physics Explained by Magical Theory. Sirius noted that both had been authored by Elias Goodwin and shivered. The witch flipped open the book and drew a long golden quill from the inside cover. She wrote something on the first page and said, "I'm sorry, but your family doesn't seem to exist."

"Listen," Sirius said, his voice shaking with anger and fear, "I don't know where I am, or what happened to me, and I would like some explanations, please."

The witch looked at him sympathetically. "I know that this is very confusing. Do you know the history of the veil?"

Sirius shook his head. "How would I? I've never seen it before today."

"It's quite interesting academically--" Goodwin broke in, but the witch waved her hand at him.

"To make it a short story, it was found in the 1920s by archaeologists in Genoa and taken to the then Ministry of Magic of Great Britain after several people disappeared simply by walking through it. No one knew what to do with it, but it was clearly an object of great power. Inscriptions on it indicated that it had been built in about 350 BC , and that it must be magic to have survived all that time, despite being made of materials that should have crumbled."

"Why are you using Muggle science to study it?" Sirius asked, curiosity piqued by her phrase, 'the then Ministry of Magic.'

She frowned at him. "The integration of Muggle technology and magic has been going on for over fifty years now--" She saw his stare and added, "ever since the war."

Sirius thought back fifty years and asked, "The Second World War?"

She pressed her lips together in annoyance. "Only left-wing historical revisionists would call it that."

The knowledge that something was terribly wrong finally sank in, and Sirius crumpled into the chair. Goodwin leaned forward, a look of excitement at this new phenomenon to be observed clear on his face. "Are you feeling dizzy? Have you remembered how you died? And when?" he asked.

"No," Sirius said. He felt sick. "What happened in the-- in the war?"

"This is England. You know that, right?"

"Yes," Sirius said. "We're in London."

"Right. Now, England surrendered to Germany in the winter of 1940, when they ran out of supplies and most of the country was starving, and all the airfields and radar had been destroyed in the Blitz. Despite heavy bombing, Scotland and Wales broke away and put up stiff resistance for the rest of the war. Northern Ireland stuck by England, of course, but the Republic invaded and took them over anyway-- that's a mess we're still trying to resolve. The United States and Russia allied shortly afterwards, and the underground resistance in England forced Germany out as soon as it started losing on the other fronts. Of course, now England has its parliament back, and things have been rebuilt-- a lot of the country was bombed and burned during the first year, and it took a long time to rebuild that, and the infrastructure--"

"England surrendered to Germany?" Sirius repeated, finally grasping the only sentence that he had really understood in her entire lecture. "We surrendered to Germany? To Hitler?"

"We had to," the witch said. "They sank all of our supply ships, they bombed out most of the country, and the government was barely functioning--"

Sirius remembered all the Muggle history books that Remus had insisted he read when they were at school; Remus's attempt to make Sirius appreciate the value of history despite Professor Binns's soporific lectures. "What about American convoys bringing supplies? What about Churchill saying we'd fight until none of us was left?"

"Why would the Americans help? They were isolationists until the Japanese--"

"No," Sirius repeated. He refused to believe it. "No, no. Churchill had a pact with Roosevelt, they were friends--"

"Who," the witch asked, "is this Churchill?"

They were at an impasse. Sirius looked bleakly at the two people before him, sensing that he was utterly lost in something he didn't understand, and they looked back at him with their detached academic interest. "The Prime Minister," he tried. "During the war."

"Chamberlain, you mean?"

Sirius shook his head, helpless. "I think that the... place where I came from... has a different past to this one."

The witch's eyes widened, and Goodwin slapped his hand down on the table. "Are you saying that England never surrendered?" he demanded. "But then we wouldn't be allowed to use Muggle technology-- we wouldn't have figured out this veil, we would still be thinking that the people who fell through it were dead rather than--"

"I'm not dead," Sirius snapped. "Stop saying I am."

"But you must be, at least where you came from, or else you wouldn't have been able to come here. Everyone that we sent through for the experiment disappeared, but dead people have been known to come through. Sometimes they're missing things-- memories or on occasion limbs, and there was that one chap who had the plague-- but they are always revived from death."

"Fine," Sirius said. "Fine, believe what you will, but this is some sort of... I don't know... a different place than where I left it."

"But not temporally. Everyone else we've studied has only a temporal difference; the history of where they came from matches up with ours." Goodwin practically bounced out of his seat with excitement. "This is so interesting."

"I'm sure it is for you," Sirius said, voice cold. He turned to address the witch. "What did you mean, the Lupin family doesn't exist?"

"Not in England, anyway," she said. "We don't have records for Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but you have a London accent, so I assumed..."

Sirius breathed out, relieved. The Lupin family was Welsh. He stood up and pushed back the chair. No matter what had happened, he had to find Remus, and together they would sort it out. Together was the best way for them to function, and the only way they ever had functioned, except for one fateful October. And we all know how that ended, Sirius thought, and then, what if James and Lily never died here? Obviously these wizards don't recognize me, or they would have arrested me. What if all this altered history meant that Voldemort never rose? What if--

"Mr. Lupin, please sit down," the witch said. "We have several questions we need to ask you, and then you will be placed in quarantine until--"

"No," he said, shaking his head. He was done with prisons. "You can't hold me here."

Goodwin laughed. "Of course we can," he said. "We put a spell on anyone who emerges from the veil in case they attempt to Apparate. We did it just as you came through."

Sirius shrugged. "There are other ways to travel." The witch made a move to draw her wand, but he snatched it out of her hand and twisted it so that it pointed at her. Twelve years in Azkaban had left him with no qualms about threatening wizards in authority. "Don't move," he added to Goodwin, who had begun to rise. "I was almost an Auror, and I can Stun you both before you even touch your wands." He backed into the door, twisted it open with his free hand, and was out of it and running before either of them had reacted. As he stepped into the lift at the end of the corridor he yelled, "Colloportus!" and heard the door seal with a satisfying squelch.

He hadn't had to find his way around the Ministry of Magic since he was eighteen and applying for Auror training, but when he exited the lift at the lobby level he saw a straightforward path past the front desk to the Floo stops. He slipped the witch's wand into his robe and walked briskly to the long line of fireplaces. When the Order had mapped out escape routes from the Ministry, just in case they ever found themselves fighting there, they'd mentioned a fireplace hooked up to the Floo network in a sub-level of Paddington station. Sirius heard someone behind him shout, "Stop!" and glanced back as he grabbed a handful of green Floo powder. A contingent of red-robed witches and wizards were coming straight for him. He smiled at them, stepped into the fire, and flung down the powder.

He burst into a dark, subterranean room that contained only the fireplace behind him and a thin book hanging from a string. In the flickering, vaguely green light from the fire he opened the book and a wall to his right slid open. Dust drifted down from the ceiling as a train pulled into the station above and, coughing on ash and smoke, Sirius went up the stairs and pressed his way through a magical barrier and into the upper level of the station.

The interior was gray and concrete, far bleaker than it should have been. Sirius wondered if it had been bombed in the war and rebuilt with only utility in mind. Crossing the station, he bought a ticket to the village in the north of Wales that Remus's family was from and then entered the train and settled into a compartment for the trip.

Looking out the window of the train, he saw a landscape very different from the one that he had observed flying with Buckbeak a year ago. London was gray and rundown, full of ugly, functional looking houses and shops. Only a few shadowy outlines on the horizon looked like the city Sirius was accustomed to, and he guessed that if he approached those landmarks they would be just as disheartening as these. Sirius pulled down the blind and leaned back against the seat, shutting his eyes and trying to erase the view. His thoughts crowded in, clamoring for attention and making his head ache at the temples. If no one recognizes me, they must have caught Peter, or else James and Lily never died. Which means that I must exist somewhere out there, and Remus too... except there were no Lupins in England, so Remus must be somewhere else, and I must be somewhere with him... if there even is a Sirius Black here, or a Remus Lupin or a James Potter or anyone that I know, because if the war went so differently then everyone's life must have been affected by it in some way, and some things must not have happened, like crucial meetings between people's parents-- and other things must be different too, if Churchill was never Prime Minister, if they don't even know who he was...

Sirius leaned forward and put his head in his hands. They had pondered the implications of time travel in some of his classes at Hogwarts, and he remembered Peter throwing his fifth useless bit of parchment across the common room, complaining that just the idea of writing an essay about the implications of traveling back in time and killing one's parents was making him feel ill. But I didn't travel through time, just through that damned veil-- the witch said I was in the same time as the one I left-- except everything's different--

Sirius definitely had a headache. He shifted his thoughts to the battle in the Department of Mysteries, but that only made him more worried. Harry and Remus-- the only two people he really loved anymore, so much that it seemed as if all the love he'd had for everyone he'd ever known, but who had died or betrayed him or both, had become concentrated on those two alone-- had been safe the last time he'd seen them, but Bellatrix was the most dangerous of the Death Eaters. Azkaban had only given her natural cruelty an insane tinge. Without him there to fight her, she could have hurt them...

Sirius fell asleep like that, slumped against the window, and did not wake up until the conductor entered the compartment and informed him that they'd reached their final stop. Sirius stood up on shaky legs and brushed past the man, stepping out of the train and into a fine, sunny day. The northern Welsh countryside was verdant and undulated in rolling hills. The village that Remus had grown up in lay in the shadow of several small green mountains, and it appeared far more prosperous and normal than London had-- to Sirius's eyes, it looked exactly the same as it had on the numerous occasions that he'd come to visit Remus's family. Comforted, he walked down the length of the platform and was about to leave the station when a soldier confronted him. The man had a long metal stick slung over one shoulder, and Sirius noted that he seemed to draw power from its presence.

"Fresh from London, eh? You need to check in with customs," the soldier said. His eyes traveled up and down Sirius's black robe in apparent distaste. "Where's your passport?"

"Um, do I need one to come from London?" Sirius asked. He wasn't entirely certain what a passport was.

The soldier narrowed his eyes. "Of course."

"Where can I get one of these pastports?"

"I don't appreciate your lip," the soldier snapped. "You can get a passport from your district in London. If you don't have one, then you're getting right back on that train."

Sirius sighed. "I don't have one," he admitted. "But I can't get on that train. I'm looking for a Remus Lupin--"

"Don't know him, and even if I did, you would still need a passport."

Sirius gave up, Confunded the solider, and left him marching away from the station in the direction of a pub. Slipping his wand back into his robes, Sirius began the long hike up the side of a hill to the Lupin family cottage. This was where he had stayed a year earlier, after Dumbledore told him to "lie low at Lupin's," and where he and Remus had spent many holidays in the first few years after they'd left Hogwarts. The weed-strewn path and the hills lying under a blanket of wildflowers smelled like summer rain and reminded him of freedom and happier times. He hummed softly to himself, remembering an old song that they had liked the first time they'd spent Christmas there, and trailed his fingers through the high grass. A pleasant ache settled in his stomach, anticipation rolled into excitement at being outside for the first time in months. When he'd first broken out of Azkaban, after he'd swum away from the island as Padfoot, he'd stumbled up onto the beach and transformed back into a human and just lay in the surf, shivering and crying with joy as the sand washed into his prison robes. Now, Sirius rolled up the sleeves of his robe and hoped he got sunburned and vowed that he would never be in prison again, and to hell with the Ministry of Magic, and being a wanted man, and whatever Dumbledore thought he should do. To hell with whatever that veil had done to him; he was outside and he was on his way to find Remus. Sweat rolled down his back in the heat and he resisted the urge to transform, throw himself into the grass, and roll around.

The sight of the cottage, appearing over a low rise, stripped away his happiness as suddenly as it had come. It was clearly abandoned, and had been for several years-- the thatched roof had caved in on one side and part of the south wall had crumbled into the weedy remains of the overgrown garden. Sirius pushed the wooden door and it swung wide. Sunlight filtered through the dust and illuminated a thin shaft of cobwebs. Only a few broken pieces of furniture remained, and there were animal tracks across the floor. Sirius shut the door again, quickly, and took several deep breaths. He walked in a circuit around the cottage, looking for any sign of life, and finally found a curled-up sign posted on one of the windows. It read: "Warning: No Trespassing, Private Property. All inquiries directed to John Lupin--" and gave an address down in the village.

Sirius tore the sign off and returned to the village, almost running down the path now, afraid that he was going to find that address deserted as well. Instead, he came to a large, ramshackle house set down a tree-lined lane. He dusted off his robes and lifted the heavy, wolf's head knocker.

A man in a wheelchair missing his legs answered the door. It took Sirius several seconds of open staring to realize that the man was Remus's father, John, who had died (at least in the world Sirius had been in before he fell through the veil...) with both legs intact before Sirius went into Azkaban. Then John cocked his head to the side and asked, "Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for your son," Sirius said.

John frowned. "Which one?"

Panic rose in Sirius's stomach as he said, "Remus." Remus never had a brother...

John continued to frown. "He's in Cardiff. Has been for ten years now."

"Who is your other son?"

"Christopher. How do you know Remus?"

Sirius froze. He could either lie or tell the truth, and either way it would come off sounding crazy. If Remus was in Cardiff, and had been for ten years, then there was no way that Sirius could fabricate a convincing story of how they knew each other. He'd always liked Remus's father-- the Lupins had practically taken him in, much the way the Potters had-- and Sirius decided to take a chance.

"It's rather a long story, and it doesn't make very much sense to even me," he began, "but I know Remus very well and have ever since we were at Hogwarts together, and I really need to speak to him."

John blinked, seemed to really see Sirius for the first time, and pushed himself back from the door. "Come in and try to explain."

Sirius followed him into the house, which was cool compared to the summer heat, and a few minutes later he was seated opposite John on a comfortable couch in a spacious library. A house elf brought them tea, and Sirius remembered with a pang tea with this same man back at the cottage, almost twenty years earlier. The Lupins hadn't had a house elf then.

Remus's father broke into his reverie. "I'm John Lupin, as you've probably guessed," he said, indicating the sign still clutched in Sirius's hand. "Why did you go up to the cottage? It's been deserted over fifty years."

Sirius sipped his tea and tried to think how to phrase what he needed to say. "I... when I came to visit you before... with Remus... you lived there."

John raised his eyebrows. "I've never met you before, and I haven't lived there since before Remus was born. Before I was married, even. I lost my legs in the war, when the Germans almost invaded Wales, and it's too much work for me to get up to the cottage because of it."

"Right," Sirius said hastily. "Right, but you see... when I knew Remus... well, I still know Remus, but back then... England never surrendered in the war."

John pushed himself back slightly and Sirius saw his hand slipping toward his wand. "What did you say your name was?"

"Sirius Black." He thought he could hear his heart pounding over the gentle sounds of the books flapping their pages to keep cool.

"Never heard of you. You weren't one of Remus's friends at Hogwarts," John said. His hand was now openly on the wand. "I don't know what you're playing at--"

"Look," Sirius said desperately. "I knew to go to the cottage. I knew Remus's name. I know he's a werewolf--"

"He's a what?" John demanded, slamming his teacup down on top of a particularly energetic book.

"A werewolf," Sirius repeated. His own teacup shook along with the hand that held it. "I've known ever since--"

"He's not a werewolf," John snapped. "And I don't know what gave you that idea."

Sirius stopped mid-sentence and shut his mouth. How could Remus not be a werewolf? He'd been bitten when he was only three years old-- he'd once told Sirius that he didn't remember what it was like to see the full moon because he'd been so young when it had happened-- and he'd said it happened one night when he went outside in the garden to play and had seen a beautiful wolf howling at the moon near the mint plants and had gone to pet it--

Revelation exploded in Sirius's mind. If the Lupins had never lived at the cottage with their children, then Remus had never been in the garden. There had been no bite, and his parents hadn't had to spend all their money to search for a cure, they could have had another son, they could have lived in this large house and had a house elf and--

"I'm sorry," John said suddenly. He was eyeing Sirius with distinct sympathy. "I wish I could help you. Do you want me to owl someone? Or you could use some Floo powder and go home-- I can get you past the ban on illegal Londoners, it's not too tough with a bit of spellwork..."

"No," Sirius said faintly. "No, just listen to me, please. Something terrible has happened..."

An hour later Sirius sank back against the cushions, in a worse state of shock than before he had told his life story to John. He had begun with his years at Hogwarts, meeting Remus and James and Peter, becoming an Animagi for Remus and falling in love with him, and continued through the war with Voldemort, through being sent to Azkaban, and escaping, and returning to protect Harry, and finding Remus where he least expected him. And then the two years after, the second war brewing, and he and Remus together again. The Battle in the Department of Mysteries, and Bellatrix. The veil. The aftermath of that, his frantic journey to Wales, trying to find his lover and make some sense of what had happened to him. Relating it made it sound worse and made memories that he wanted to forget well up in his mind like poison from a wound.

"Mr. Black..." John began.

"Please, call me Sirius."

"Sirius..." John lifted up a book from the floor and flipped through the pages without looking at them. It was a nervous habit that Remus had as well. "That may be the saddest story I've ever heard."

Sirius licked his lips and said, "It's not all bad."

"No," John agreed. He shook his head. "Not all bad." He continued to flip through the pages. "Stranger things have happened, both in history and in fiction," he commented, almost to the book. "You seem to know Remus-- but a different version. My son Remus would never have taught Defence Against the Dark Arts, or even been good at it-- History of Magic is his field-- and he would never have dueled, but the one you describe had to learn. We never had a war with this Voldemort character, and my son was in Ravenclaw at Hogwarts. I never heard him mention you, or the other two boys. And of course, he isn't a werewolf." He paused. "But, other things about him-- the way he thinks, the way he acts, that he would be... in love with you-- all these things fit him."

Sirius waited as John seemed to weigh his next words carefully. "I don't understand what's happened, but I believe you," he said finally. "Let me write a note to Remus, and you take it to him, and make sure he reads it before you tell him all this. He's a bit of a skeptic-- sometimes I think all this blending of magic and Muggle technology has made his generation forget what real magic is."

"That happened after the war?" Sirius asked.

"In England, it happened during the war. When the Germans came, they decided that what was in London's Ministry was too valuable not to use, and attempted to combine it with Muggle science to make weapons. Of course, Pandora's box was opened, and things couldn't go back to the way they were. Other governments responded in the same way."

"So Muggles know about the wizarding community?" Sirius asked.

"No, no more than before. But wizards are giving a lot more credit to Muggles and are forgetting the ancient ways that have governed us for centuries." He seemed to be sizing up Sirius. "Black, did you say?"

Sirius nodded.

"Hmm," he replied. "The name... but I don't know..." His voice trailed off, and he seemed to be talking to himself as he concentrated. It was another habit that Remus had inherited. "In this reality, you might not exist."

"This reality?" Sirius repeated. "You mean the one that I've entered after falling through the veil?"

"Yes, I suppose so." John sighed. "I can't pretend to know much about it. I spent my life working for the Welsh Ministry as a representative to the World Wizarding Conference. I've read a lot of books, but have no other understanding about what we're dealing with here. Alternate realities are popular deus ex machina in Muggle science fiction, of course, but..." He shook his head. "I wish I could help you somehow."

Sirius nodded. "Don't worry about it," he said. "I just... need to see Remus."

"Even if he won't recognize you?"

There was a moment of consideration and doubt, and then Sirius nodded again. "Even if. I know that I can make him understand."

John smiled sadly. "Good luck, Sirius," he said. "You seem like a good person, and I hope that my son is everything you're looking for."

An hour later, Sirius Flooed into the visitors' entrance of a vast building that had clearly been built using magic. He stepped away from the fireplace at the motioning of a young witch seated behind the entryway and moved to stand in the center of a circular room with marble floors. He tilted his head back and stared toward where the ceiling should have been, but instead he saw floors stretching upward and obscuring the view. Sunlight seemed to come from everywhere, making the walls glow a golden colour. On all sides, doors flared open to reveal long book-lined corridors. Sirius spun back to the witch and said, "Where are the offices of the curators?"

"Step inside the lift," she said with a gesture towards one of the doors. "Say the name of the person you want to see into the golden coil, and up you'll go."

The inside of the lift was an architectural nightmare. Sirius stood as far away from the control panel as possible and watched in horror as the numbered buttons undulated up and down the wall in waves-- there were so many that they could not all stay on the wall at once, but instead whizzed around the tiny lift at top speed and lit upon the wall for a few seconds before zooming off again. After the doors slammed shut with a resonating clang, Sirius was plunged into darkness filled with the buzzing of thousands of buttons. A single candle appeared, and the walls began to glow. He stretched out and grabbed a long golden coil from the wall, and spoke Remus's name into it loudly and clearly; then the lift shot straight up with a violent shudder. Sirius put a hand on the wall to steady himself, but the buttons immediately began to buzz around him in a fury and he jumped back.

After a very long time, the doors unfurled onto a well lit catwalk high above the ground. Rain clouds had gathered in the sky during his journey, and Sirius drew his robe more tightly around himself and sprinted across the catwalk to a solid wooden door. A shiny gold plaque on the door proclaimed: "Remus Lupin, Curator of the Library of Magical History."

Sirius stopped running and stared at the golden words. The archaic, curling script was the first thing to halt his headlong run to Remus since he'd crossed the veil into this world. The second was the sound of a man speaking from behind the door. The voice was hoarse and rich and unmistakably Welsh and even more unmistakably Remus. Sirius grabbed onto the door handle as the world and his stomach started to twist dangerously, but then the door handle itself was twisting dangerously, and a handsome, tanned man with blond-brown hair and laugh lines around his mouth replaced the heavy wood.

"Hello?" the voice asked in his accent, a little thicker than the one Sirius was used to, as if this man had lived his whole life in Wales. "Can I help you?"

With the door knob gone, there was nothing left to cling to except memory. "Remus?" Sirius whispered. "Is it you?"

The man frowned. "Yes, who are you?"

He doesn't know me, Sirius thought, and then, of course he doesn't, you knew he wouldn't, but still you made yourself come here, even though you knew... "Sirius Black," he tried. Was there even a moment of recognition, a long forgotten name from school, in this man's mind? The blank stare was worse even than the year after he'd escaped from Azkaban, when he'd known that if he met Remus's eyes all he would see would be the pain of betrayal. At least then he could elicit some emotion from the other.

"I'm sorry, have you written a paper?" the man asked. "I sent all the ones we chose for publication out last night. I'm afraid you're too late, although of course you can apply for our next--"

"No," Sirius said. "No, I didn't write a paper. I've--" He broke off, unsure of what to say. "I've got a letter from your father."

"Why didn't he just owl it to me?" the man asked, but already he had extended his hand to take it.

"It's... important that you read it now," Sirius said. He pulled the envelope from his robe and held it out, and the man seemed to realize that rain was imminent.

"I'm terribly sorry, come in to my office while I read this," he said. The doorway loomed before Sirius in a way that the veil had not, and he reached out to touch something solid again, to reassure himself that he was not, in fact, dead. The door surrendered itself to his touch as he shut it.

When he looked up, the man was staring at the letter, a crease between his eyebrows. Sirius swallowed and perched on the edge of a cluttered desk to await judgment.

"Did you read this letter?" the man finally asked.

"No, but I know the gist of it," Sirius said.

The man looked up, and his eyes were the color of Remus's but they lacked the depth of loss. "Is this the truth?"

Sirius nodded.

"You're from some other... reality? Some other place where history is different than it is here?"

He nodded again.

"And in this reality of yours, you know me? And for some reason that made you think that you could come to me in this one and I would help you?"

"Yes," Sirius said. His Remus would never have phrased it like that. "Stupid, I know."

"No," this Remus said. He ran a hand through his hair and gnawed on his lip. "Not stupid. I didn't mean to sound hostile, but it's all a little... surprising. Shocking. Hard to believe. Do you understand?" He glanced up, but he seemed to be looking past Sirius. "Not that I don't believe you. My father's word is good. And things have been getting... strange here. Things have been falling out of place that shouldn't..." His voice trailed off, leaving Sirius unsure of what to say except:

"Thank you." Sirius didn't know the etiquette of the situation--what could he ask for? What had he expected? That Remus would fix everything, whispered a voice in his head. That he would step in and take over where you could not.

"Cup of tea?" Remus asked. He laid the letter on the desk and offered Sirius a china cup. He had a helpless look. Sirius accepted it with shaking hands and wondered when tea had stopped calming him. Maybe it had happened in the endless cups drank with Molly Weasley in Grimmauld Place, when frustration had boiled under his skin every time he sat motionless at a table. Maybe it had happened fifteen years before, when he would watch Remus standing over the stove, burning his hands on the teakettle and cursing fluently, while Sirius wondered if it was how much he loved Remus that prevented him from thinking of him as the traitor. He remembered shouting at James once that he would have looked the other way if he'd seen Remus murder a litter of puppies with his bare hands, and James had thrown his own hands up in the air and told Sirius he was going crazy from the stress of it, that they all just needed to calm down and stop suspecting each other, and somehow that had led to asking Peter to be the Secret Keeper, because Sirius had known that if it was him he would somehow give it away to Remus...

"Is it too hot?" this Remus asked, and Sirius jumped.

"Sorry." He sipped too much and it burned his throat. "A bit."

"Lost in thought?" Remus asked. "I can't even imagine how you must be feeling." He leaned back against the desk and looked sideways at Sirius. "Why come to me? What am I to you where you came from?"

Nothing, Sirius thought, will ever be easy. Nothing will ever make sense, nothing will ever be fair, and nothing but you, Remus, can keep me sane. "You and I were... close."

"Forgive me if I offend," Remus said, reaching out and taking Sirius's cup from him. Sirius's hands were shaking too badly to hold it well. "Were we lovers?"

Grateful, Sirius nodded again. "Since we were sixteen."

Remus whistled, a low sound through his teeth. "That's a long time."

"There were some rough times," Sirius began, but that wasn't right. Rough times had never had to do with he and Remus, just with what happened around them. "Events in the world made things hard."

"Sure," this Remus said. "They always do. Tell me about... you and him." He smiled apologetically. "It's too odd to say 'us.'"

Sirius did not smile back. "I understand." And then he didn't know where to begin, so he sat and watched Remus drink from his teacup. He was not who he should have been, but he was something, and the way he chewed on his lip between sips made Sirius's stomach twist relentlessly.

"We went to Hogwarts together?" Remus prompted eventually. "Ravenclaw?"

"No, Gryffindor," Sirius said. "You, me, and two boys named James Potter and Peter Pettigrew." His stomach continued to twist, now with anger. "We were best friends. No, more than that. We went so far as to take oaths and cut our palms open so we could share blood. And after we left school, we fought alongside each other in the war against this powerful Dark wizard, Voldemort--but in the end, Peter betrayed us, and James was killed and I was sent to prison for what Peter did..."

"Azkaban?" Remus asked, and Sirius thought, It exists here too? and shivered

"I see," Remus said a minute later. "Or rather, I don't see at all, but I'm just trying to see..." Sirius looked up and met Remus's still-apologetic look. "I remember the other two--James and Peter--inseparable friends, but no Sirius. I'm terribly sorry. I didn't know them well, and I've barely seen them since--"

"They're alive?" Sirius demanded. "James is alive?"

Remus shrugged. "I suppose they are. I haven't heard."

"Who did James marry?"

Remus shrugged again. "I have no idea."

"Do you remember a girl named Lily? She had long red hair. She and James got married."

"No, I don't remember a Lily, sorry..."

Sirius put his fingers to his temples and shook his head. "This is so fucked up."

"Yes," Remus agreed. "But... it makes a strange sort of sense..."

Sirius raised an eyebrow, but Remus was staring out the window at the driving rain. "How so?" he prompted.

"Oh," Remus said, startled from his reverie. "Oh, things have been very strange recently. The Wizarding world, magic, even the Muggle world--strange events all over the place." He reached behind Sirius to the desk and picked up a copy of the Daily Prophet. On the cover, a dragon roared in a crowded street and chewed on a Muggle car. "This is Edinburgh, earlier today. The dragon just appeared there. They had the devil of a time fixing Muggle memories, not to mention getting that out of the city center." He pulled out more papers from the clutter, and Sirius flipped through them. Each had a headline chronicling strange events--magic and Muggle coming together, and destruction always the result. "No one knows what it means," Remus said absently, now pawing through stacks of books and used parchment in search of something else. "But some of us--those of us who are more, shall we say, intellectually minded--have begun to speculate. Just before you got here we were speaking about it." He motioned to the fireplace. "A bit of a conference as things have suddenly taken a turn for the worse..."

Sirius set the papers down and watched Remus. He had that familiar, abstracted expression that meant he was concentrating on something very hard. "You think that what happened to me is related?"

Remus found what he was looking for--a thick, leather-bound book with a large crest on it--and slid down the side of the desk to sit on the floor. "Sit with me," he said, touching the floor and then raising his hand to flip open the book.

The wood floor was hard, as was the back of the wooden desk, but Sirius sat watching Remus stroke his long-fingered hand down the pages of the book in fascination. One day at Grimmauld Place, on one of those dreary-dark London days when the clouds hung close to the pavement and gloom gathered in every corner of the house, he had come into the library in search of a way to pass the time and found Remus standing in the centre of the room. A book had been perched on his outstretched hands, his fingers graceful as they ran up and down the spine, and his mouth outlining the words he read like a prayer. Sirius had put a hand on the doorframe to steady himself as he watched those well-loved fingers make their slow journey up and down pages curling with age, content to simply watch Remus, who was home three days earlier than they'd expected from a mission. Then Remus had looked up and their eyes had met, and Sirius didn't know who had crossed the room, or if they'd met in the middle, but their arms were around each other and words of longing had resonated throughout the still library air. As Remus had nuzzled his face into Sirius's neck, Sirius remembered seeing the book fall to the floor, where it had landed on its belly with its spine cracked open like a wound.

"Are you all right?" the present Remus inquired.

Sirius blinked and looked up from the book. "Yes, sorry, forgot where I was."

Remus placed the book lightly on Sirius's drawn up knees. "I'm so sorry," he said, his finger resting on a clump of black inked words.

"What?" Sirius looked blindly down at the book, still caught up in a memory so tactile he could almost feel his Remus's patched robe under his hands. Azkaban had done that to him: when memories came, good or bad, they were so real that they forced away the present and left him trapped in the past.

"Your family," Remus said. "The Blacks." Leaning forward, he read, "Procyon Black was the last of his family after the invasion of 1940. Heavy bombing had destroyed the family home earlier in the year. Black was sent to live with his relatives the Malfoys until his seventeenth birthday, when he voluntarily joined the army. He was killed in the 1947 Storming of Berlin, thus ending a family line that had begun in the time of Henry II."

"Procyon was my father," Sirius said blankly. He had not yet realized what it meant.

"Yes," Remus said, "in your world."

Imprisoned somewhere where he didn't even exist. "God, I was never born."

"I'm so sorry," Remus repeated. He seemed at a loss, which wasn't right, because Sirius could not remember a time when Remus hadn't known what to do. "I know there's nothing I can say to make this better."

"I have to get back," Sirius whispered. "I can't stay here if I don't even exist."

His Remus would have nodded and planned. This one merely stared at him. "Get back how?"

"I thought you'd know," Sirius confessed. He felt stupid for that now.

Remus shook his head. "I have no idea."

They sat in silence for several minutes. Remus flipped through the book and Sirius tipped his head back against the desk and stared out the window at the drizzle. Finally, Remus slammed the book down on the floor and said, "I want to help you." Sirius twisted his head around in surprise and Remus shrugged and added, "Not just for my own intellectual curiosity, either. There's something about you that makes me want to help you." He glanced at his watch. "It's almost ten o'clock. We ought to get some sleep and think about this in the morning." Standing, he held out his hand to Sirius. "Come on, I've got a nice couch you can stay on."

Remus lived in a flat over a crowded Muggle pub in the heart of Cardiff, and long after Sirius lay down on the dark green couch to sleep he could hear the cheers and shouts of rowdy football fans below. His mind was on perpetual race mode, his heart beating far too fast and his hands shaking at his sides. Eventually he gave up trying to calm down and fall asleep and swung his legs over the side of the couch. Outside, the rain had turned to drizzle, beads of water down the front window illuminated by a humming streetlamp. Sirius wandered over to the bookcase and looked through the titles arrayed before him--

"A man's bookshelf is the measure of his mind," his Remus was fond of saying--

and took note of how many of them were Muggle science books, how many of them combined magic with Muggle technology, how few of them were written in Welsh. This Remus was obviously a well-educated man, but he seemed to have an obsession with Muggle--

"Looking for something in particular?" Remus's voice made Sirius jump and turn.

"Sorry to startle you," he continued, stepping out of the doorway from what Sirius guessed must be his bedroom. "That damn football game..." He gestured to the floor. "I couldn't sleep. If you're looking for something in particular, I've got more books in the kitchen."

Sirius shook his head. "No, nothing in particular. I couldn't sleep either."

"Not the noise, I take it?" Remus asked. He stepped closer and let his fingers trail down the edge of the books.

Sirius watched him, fascinated by the play of the lamplight on his face. It provided shadow, filled in years of pain that weren't there, until the man before him blended with the one in his memory. He is who Remus should have been, Sirius thought.

"It wasn't really the noise for me either," Remus confessed. "I've been thinking about what happened to you, and trying to draw some conclusions." He pulled out a book that Sirius saw was the same one that had been in the Ministry of Magic: Advanced Magical Objects: Not As Benign As They Look. "This veil that you talked about..."

They sat beside each other on the floor, their backs leaning against the cold window, and flipped through the book together. It seemed perfectly natural to Sirius to let his arm rest alongside this man's, to let their thighs touch as they read, because the shadows and the lamplight had settled like a glamour upon him. Remus appeared ageless, featureless, like a blank sheet of parchment that Sirius could write upon and shape to his will with a few simple words.

"Is this it?" The illustration in the book was identical to what Sirius had fallen through: the stone dais, the tattered cloth fluttering in an unseen breeze.

"Yes," Sirius said. One word was all he had, like a stone dropped through a lake.

Remus frowned as a car rushed by below, the headlights illuminating him and breaking the spell. "It's listed as a powerful time manipulation device, first created by the Greeks and rumoured to have been enchanted by Olympia, Alexander the Great's mother. British archaeologists found it in Genoa 1921, but couldn't begin to guess its purpose, or why something with inscriptions from 4^th century Macedonia was on an island off the coast of Italy, so they sent it to the Ministry in London where various experiments were tried with it..." He fell silent for a few seconds, then picked up again. "The nature of these experiments isn't stated, but they all seem to have resulted in fatalities. Something happened with a dead soldier falling through it, but I don't quite understand that... The veil was sealed in a room in the Department of Mysteries and people were forbidden from passing through it. Someone noted that whispering voices were often heard through it, but that no one could understand them..." He turned over the page and continued, "The only other mention of this obviously powerful magical device comes from 1347 AD. The wizard Alberto di Siena drew a picture of it--" He pointed out a crude, two-dimensional sketch to Sirius--"and stated that someone had fallen through it from another time where they believed they were dead. Their body was covered in mysterious boils. This was in Genoa just a few days before..."

Remus fell silent and Sirius pulled the book close and searched the page until he found the line Remus had been reading.

"'Just a few days before the plague that would become known as the Black Death and would kill 1/3 of Europe's population began.' In Genoa."

"Uh," Remus said. "Um, so it seems as if this veil pops up and something crucial to history happens. Alexander the Great, the Black Death, and now..."

"Wait," Sirius replied. "Wait, what about 1921? When the archaeologists found it?"

Remus frowned. "Good point. But not much happened in 1921. World War I was over, the Dark wizard Grindelwald hadn't risen to power yet... Nothing else that really changed the world took place anytime around then."

"Maybe we're focusing too much on Europe," Sirius suggested. "What about in America? Or Japan or China or--"

Remus shook his head. "Nothing I can think of." He pulled out his wand and said, "Accio book!" A thick volume flew from the bookcase straight at them and they shot apart as it crashed into the wall.

"Nice," Sirius said with a grin. "Good aim."

Remus grinned as well and said to the book, "Take me to 1921." He scooted close to Sirius until they were touching again, which Sirius thought was a little odd but did not question. He had gone so many years without human touch that anything, even the casual glance of a hand across a shoulder, or leg against his at the dinner table, sent shivers of warmth through his fingertips.

"No," Remus said. "Well, nothing too major. Hitler was first referred to as 'der Fuhrer.' Turkey became a country. The Irish War of Independence came to an end."

Sirius put his fingers to his temples. His head was pounding and he hadn't slept in so long--downstairs the football fans started screaming again--and this was the most confusing, illogical...

"What was that?" Remus demanded.

"What?" Sirius asked. The football fans were so bloody loud, he could barely--

Remus grabbed his arm and pointed to the floor. His breath crystallized in the air in front of his mouth and Sirius realized that the room was suddenly very cold. A moment later he realized that the fans below weren't screaming in support of their favorite team.

Sirius leapt up and pulled out the witch's wand. "Come on!" he snapped. Fear thrummed in his veins. "Dementors!"

"How can they be here?" Remus asked. He was pressed into the wall. "They aren't allowed out of Azkaban!"

It was too late; the cold entered Sirius's bones and headed straight for his head. Shattered glasses in a pool of blood, his own foot lifting away from the twisted wire frames and then seeing James's broken hand across the wood floor--a baby crying, somewhere in this wreckage, and Lily, beautiful Lily slumped against the child's crib, her eyes wide and staring, one of her cheeks oozing a dark, noxious blood. Flickering images on the back of Sirius's eyelids, and again the horror as he lifted Harry from the crib and stroked his shaking fingers across the baby's forehead, coming away bloody in the shuddering light of the fire...

"Oh, God, Sirius, I think they're coming upstairs," Remus gasped, and Sirius lurched for the window. The images flickered again and he saw his brother drawing off his Death Eater's mask and facing him with his wand drawn--something rattled at the door handle, and Sirius fought with his mind, tried to wrench it to the present as he fumbled with the latch under the windowpane--Remus, his own beloved Remus standing with dark circles under his eyes and lines already on his face at the age of twenty-one and blood dripping from his arm, saying, "Just a cut, nothing at all, just something that happens in this line of work,"--and now, this Remus grabbing at the latch too, their fingers catching together in their haste to pull the window up and yelling, "They're on the ground too!"

Sirius swung himself onto the window ledge and dug his fingers into the rock wall of the building. "Roof," he managed. "Get on the roof."

The door to the flat swung inward and Remus scrambled out and clung to the stone. Sirius heard the Dementor draw breath and he could no longer see the stones beneath his fingers, only his Remus standing in Lily and James's kitchen, and Sirius could hear his own voice yelling that Remus his Remus was above all else a werewolf and Remus's face was crumpling as if he'd been punched--

"Get up," Remus gasped in Sirius's ear. "Get up on the roof!" A strong arm grabbed his and hauled him onto the tile. "God," Remus said, rubbing his face with his hand. "I've never encountered one of those before. God."

Shaking and numb, Sirius scrambled across the roof and climbed to the next. He did not stop moving until he was crawling over rain-slick tiles and Remus's hand on his shoulder pulled him up short.

"Are you all right?" Remus asked, panting and holding his hand over his head to ward off the rain.

"I don't know," Sirius said. He wrapped his arms around his knees and closed his eyes. "They're far off now, but what were they doing here? I thought you didn't have any Dark wizards trying to gain power here!"

"Not that I know of," Remus replied. "And I know quite a lot about the Welsh magical community."

"Then why the hell were they here?" Sirius repeated. His teeth chattered uncontrollably. "Someone must have sent them! They can't have escaped Azkaban unless they were coming for someone."

"Sirius, calm down," Remus said.

But he couldn't. He was shaking so badly that he thought he would lose his balance and slide down the roof. "They must have been coming for me. That wizard in the Ministry must have sent them after me, and now they've found me and they won't stop until they've--"

Remus slapped him hard across the face and then wrapped his arms around his shoulders and rocked him. "They're gone," he said. "Don't worry, they're gone."

"They'll come back," Sirius whispered, but he sank into the touch. "They won't give up."

"They're not looking for you," Remus said. "They must be part of this phenomena where magical things and Muggle things clash. That's the only explanation." He smoothed Sirius's wet hair back from his face with a gentle hand and said, "They're not after you."

The rain slithered down the tiles and far off Sirius heard a church bell ringing. Midnight. Remus's hand rested on his forehead, the only spot of warmth on his body. He shivered and Remus said, "We'll go to my father's, all right?"

"I can't Apparate," Sirius whispered. "They put a hex on me so I couldn't."

"You can Floo, though, right?"

Sirius nodded and Remus tugged him down the slope of the roof to a gutter. "I know where we can use the Network."

After sliding down the gutter pipe and using a public Floo stop outside the Slug and Lettuce, they burst out of an ornate fireplace and into the library where Sirius had spoken with Remus's father. The house was dark but a full-fledged lightning storm was tearing up the gardens outside. Both men were shivering uncontrollably and their robes had soaked through. Sirius followed Remus through the flashes of light as he circumnavigated the large room as if searching for something, then stopped short when Remus abruptly flung open the window and let the rain blow into the house.

"What are you doing?" Sirius asked, but Remus had swung his leg over the sill and leapt into the hedges.

"Thought I heard something," Remus muttered. His robe was caught in the hedges and he fought with it while Sirius stared at him. "I must have been wrong."

"What did it sound like?" Sirius asked. He leaned out the window and drew out the wand.

Remus finally pulled himself free. "It sounded like someone was arriving by broom." With a glance up to Sirius he added, "You certainly are eager with your wand."

"I made it through about a month of Auror training and that was the best I came away with."

"Why'd you quit?" Remus asked. He drew out his own wand. "Too hard?"

Sirius tried not to be insulted. "I quit the day that they taught us how to hunt and kill werewolves."

Remus apparently decided that he looked like an idiot standing outside the window and climbed back in with Sirius's help. "Why would that make you quit?"

"Well," Sirius began, "you're a werewolf. Where I come from."

Silence lingered for several seconds as Remus brushed leaves from his robes methodically. Then: "I'm a werewolf?"

"Yes, you got bitten when you were a child."

Remus frowned. "I think I prefer this reality, to be honest. Yes, I've apparently met my true love there, but he was in prison and I'm a werewolf."

"Yes, yes, our lives are terrible," Sirius snapped. "Are you sure you didn't hear anything?"

Remus looked back to the window. "I don't know," he said. "I could have sworn... but there was nothing out there."

"Remus?"

Both men jumped and twisted to face the doorway. John Lupin sat in his wheelchair, wand illuminated, the lines of a frown etched into his face.

Remus held up a hand to ward off the light and said, "I was right. Things are starting to go seriously wrong."

With a heavy sigh, John lowered the wand and waved his hand. Candles throughout the room sparked into life and they guided Sirius to a chair. "Are you certain?" John asked. He looked very old in the eerie light.

Remus nodded. "There were Dementors. In Cardiff."

John passed a hand across his face. "Did they attack you?"

"Yes," Sirius said. "But I don't understand. What were you right about, Remus?"

Lightning struck somewhere out in the garden and the electricity made the hair on Sirius's arms stand up. When the flash faded, he saw Remus sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, looking like a lost child. "Some other historians and I have a theory," he said. "A theory which the strange incidents I've been talking about--magical things and Muggle things coming together and creating chaos--make seem like more than a theory."

"Explain," Sirius ordered.

"Think of it this way:" Remus said, looking annoyed. "Wizards and witches are charged with controlling magical elements, with keeping them separate from the Muggle world. From the institution of the Statute of Secrecy in 1692, these two parallel worlds--magical and Muggle--were moving farther and farther apart. Then, in 1941, the invading Germans opened up the magical world to include unmodified Muggle technology. Suddenly one of the worlds began to merge with the other, but the Muggle world didn't--doesn't--know about the magical world. Now magic is trying to break free from the boundaries that we wizards and witches placed upon it, because we've allowed it to merge with the Muggle world."

"So magical elements will continue to invade the Muggle world until there is no separation," Sirius said. "And that's a problem?"

"Clearly you've never lived among Muggles. Think of the chaos it would create if they suddenly realized that everything they believed about the world--from the laws of physics on up--could be completely sidestepped by something called magic. Then think of the discrimination against those of us who could channel this magic."

There was a point to all this, Sirius was certain, and if they could just get through all this theory maybe Remus would say it. "So does this mean for us? What can we do?"

"Well, that veil is a powerful object dealing with magic and history..." Remus stood again and sprinted back to the window. "I swear I hear someone moving outside."

"Just the trees on the glass," John said. "They don't like the storm."

Remus stared out into the night and Sirius followed him with his eyes until John wheeled over to his chair and said, "What about you, Sirius? Have you figured anything out?"

"No," Remus answered for him. "Nothing except the veil is a powerful magical object, and whenever someone comes through it, they're resurrected from the dead and change history in some dramatic way, except that might not even be correct because it was discovered in 1921 and nothing major happened then." He growled, a remarkably lupine sound, then turned away from the window and said, "Often historical events have causes which are almost impossible to trace. Maybe something happened in 1921 which led to something else happening."

"They find people resurrected from the dead?" John repeated. "Sirius, were you...?"

"No," Sirius snapped. "I was not. I was hit with a Stunning Spell and I fell backwards. I wasn't bloody dead."

"But everyone in your world must believe you're dead," Remus said. "Anyone who saw you fall through."

The Department of Mysteries had been chaos as he and Bellatrix fought. He wondered if Harry or Remus had seen him fall through the veil, if they were mourning his death. He hoped not. "What does that matter?"

"You don't exist there anymore, only here. So you're affecting our history with everything you do, and no longer affecting theirs."

"I can't keep track of this," Sirius said. "This is the most confusing..."

"I know," Remus said sympathetically. He perched on the edge of Sirius's chair and placed one of his hands on Sirius's head. "I don't fully understand it myself." Sirius looked up at him and Remus smiled and said, "I don't understand it at all, is what I mean."

"I just want to go back," Sirius said.

"But I don't know how you can," Remus replied. "You have to be dead--or appear dead--to go through. And we'd have to get to London and into their Ministry."

The house elf entered the room, the tablecloth he wore as a toga trailing behind him, and said, "Someone here to see you, Master Lupin."

"Now?" John asked, looking at his watch. "It's nearly one o'clock in the morning!"

Sirius drew out his wand and a moment later Remus did the same, although the fingers of his other hand remained twined in Sirius's hair. John frowned at them and said, "Expecting someone?"

"I just have a bad feeling about it," Sirius said.

"Right, well, you two stay in here," John said. He wheeled out the door of the library.

At the command of a spell from Remus, the door shut silently and locked. "Who do you think it is?" Remus whispered.

"I'd imagine that the Ministry of Magic is looking for me," Sirius said, shivering. He hoped they hadn't brought Dementors...

"But why would they know to come here?"

With a wince, Sirius said, "I gave them my name as James Lupin. Because in my world I'm an escaped convict."

The corners of Remus's mouth twitched, and he slid down the arm of the chair until they were seated beside one another. "You've certainly had an interesting life, eh?"

And from there it was simply easy and natural for Sirius to lean his head back against Remus's chest and close his eyes. Remus's arm dropped down across his shoulders and toyed with the clasp on his robes, and even though this man lacked that certain hint of the wild in his scent, Sirius could easily imagine that he was where he belonged.

The door lock popped off and the house elf entered, a worried look on his gnarled face. "Master Remus, your father wants you to get out and take Master Sirius with you. He says that the English Ministry of Magic is here and is looking for someone named James."

They were both out of the chair in seconds, not quite moving in unison, but almost. Sirius crossed the room and flung the window open again while Remus moved to a desk and dug through the drawers.

"What are you waiting for?" Sirius hissed. "I can't go back there with them, they think I'm some sort of experiment!"

"You are," Remus hissed back, still digging.

"Go to hell," Sirius replied, running over to join him. "What are you looking for?"

"Money," Remus said. He looked up briefly from the bottom drawer and pointed to one of the bookshelves. "Accio book!" he called, and several books flew at them off the shelves. Sirius caught as many as he could, but several more fell to the floor.

"Take them!" Remus said. "The right one should be in there." As Sirius stuffed various books into his robe pockets, Remus surfaced clutching a handful of coins. "There should be enough for a room in London here." He picked up a few more books and stuffed those into his own pockets.

"We're going to London?" Sirius asked, running back across the room to the window with Remus at his heels.

Remus pulled himself out and jumped down the few feet into the bush. "Seems like the best plan," he said, holding out his hand and helping Sirius, burdened with books, down from the sill. "We'll be near the Ministry in case we need to get to the veil quickly." They froze, hearing voices from around the corner, and crouched down in the bushes. Sirius realized that they were still holding hands as Remus whispered, "This is the craziest thing I've ever done."

Their eyes met and Sirius felt strange, giddy, like he did around his Remus. Three months earlier Sirius and Remus had been sitting in one of the libraries of Grimmauld Place. Sirius's head lay in Remus's lap as Remus read a book, and, after watching him for several minutes Sirius had asked, "Aren't we too old to be in love like this?" Remus had lowered the book and smiled and said, "Maybe. Do you mind it?" Of course Sirius didn't, and he'd said as much with a lingering kiss, but ever after they would find themselves with butterflies in their stomachs or silly, romantic things on their lips and grin at one another as if they secretly knew they were foolish but were unable to change.

The voices faded away into the storm and Remus shivered against Sirius. "Brooms are in the shed back there," he whispered, pointing with his wand. "Just grab one and we'll go." He looked back and Sirius and raised his eyebrows. "Is this a good plan? Can you think of something better?"

"What are the books for?" Sirius asked. His teeth chattered as rainwater ran under his collar and down his back.

"Figuring out what happened in 1921. And using that to guess what your appearance here means."

"Good," Sirius said. "Let's go."

Wet, cold, and clutching their brooms tightly, they rented a room in the Leaky Cauldron and ascended the narrow stairs in squelching shoes. London remained as bleak and changed as Sirius had thought it was on his first trip through it in this world, and he was happy to draw down the shades on the windows and sit on the bed with the books. Remus tugged off his wet robes and wrapped himself in one of the bed's thick wool blankets before pacing around the room.

"Ugh," Remus said. "I smell like a wet dog."

"It's not a bad smell," Sirius said absently. "Just takes some getting used to... I've been thinking about what one of the witches said to me when I first arrived here."

Remus wrinkled his nose and said, "Yes?"

"She told me about how England surrendered to the Germans because they destroyed all the radar and weren't receiving any help from the Americans."

"That's right..."

"Well, where I come from the Nazis never destroyed the radar, because they switched to bombing cities and other places full of innocent civilians after the RAF bombed Berlin. And the Americans sent aid almost from the beginning of the war."

Remus frowned. "The RAF bombed Berlin?"

"Right. Hitler vowed that the Motherland would never be bombed, so, on the orders of the Prime Minister, the RAF bombed Berlin. But the PM is apparently different from the one you had."

"What was his name?"

"Sir Winston Churchill."

Suddenly Remus was on the bed, digging through the books. "The wounded soldier!" he said. "The one that fell through the veil in 1921!"

"Yes?" Sirius asked. "What about him?"

Remus thrust a book of Irish history into Sirius's hands and then flipped through the pages while Sirius held it open. "He was the assassin!"

"What assassin?"

Pointing triumphantly to the page, Remus read, "Protesting Parliament's position on Ireland, the IRA assassinated a young MP who had aided Lloyd George with the peace treaty: Winston Churchill. Moments later, the assassin was caught by British soldiers, who shot him through the shoulder, but it was too late for Churchill. The assassin had used a magical poison on him and they would probably have forced him to tell them the antidote if he hadn't fallen through the..."

Sirius bent over the page and read on, "veil. The assassin was a young wizard whose name is unknown, as the assassination took place in the British Ministry of Magic--where Churchill had been meeting with a delegation of wizarding leaders from all over the United Kingdom--and after being shot the assassin immediately fell through an ancient magical veil that had recently been brought by archaeologists from Genoa."

The book slid off his knees onto the bed and Remus sat down beside him with a thump. "So the veil caused this," he said, waving his hand toward the window. "Or... someone falling through it did. If he hadn't fallen through, they would have been able to find out what the antidote was."

Sirius nodded bleakly. "Whenever someone falls through the veil, they cause destruction."

"All those articles I showed you," Remus said. "All the ones one my desk, showing dragons in Edinburgh and other magical and Muggle things coming together. They were very recent. All from the day before, which is the day you fell through the veil. Then the Dementors appeared in Cardiff, and did God-knows-what to the people in that pub."

"I'm the cause of it," Sirius whispered. "I'm the reason why these things are happening."

"You're causing the two worlds to come too close together," Remus said hollowly. "There had been indications that this might happen before, which is how we came up with the theory-- and we thought we could fix things. We didn't expect anything to happen this quickly."

"I have to go back now," Sirius said. He lay down on the bed and Remus lay down beside him, each turning so that they faced one another. "I'm destroying things."

"No," Remus said. "I think it might be too late. I don't think we can reverse this course of history."

"But what about everything you said would happen?"

Remus moved closer, unwrapping the blanket from his shoulders and spreading it over both of them. "I don't think we can prevent it."

"And what about the world I came from? What happens there? What happens to Remus there?"

"I don't know," Remus said softly. He put one arm around Sirius and drew him closer until their legs were twined together. "I don't have any good answers for you."

"Then what can I do?" Sirius asked, moving into the embrace instinctively.

Remus ran his hand through Sirius's hair. "You could stay here," he whispered.

The bed was warm and Remus's thigh was hot and inviting where it curved between his own. Sirius rested his hand on it lightly and Remus sighed and leaned into him.

"Think about it. You wouldn't be on the run. You wouldn't be fighting against any Dark Wizard. You wouldn't have to worry about anyone dying of unnatural causes, except maybe getting hit by a bus." Remus shifted and inched his other hand under Sirius's shirt. "You could have me."

Memory struggled in Sirius's mind as Remus's mouth opened like a rose onto his own, and forgotten sensations exploded in the pads of his hands as Remus took them and ran them up his leg to cup him. They gasped into each other's mouths and Sirius, immersed in the hot curves of Remus's tongue and the wild pulsing of Remus's blood beneath his hands, only paused when Remus didn't make that little whimpering noise in the back of his throat that always made Sirius shiver--and Sirius pulled away and looked at the man before him--terribly handsome, his brown hair dark with rain and sweat and clinging to his forehead--

Their hips were pressed together and Remus's erection rubbed against his own through the layers of fabric. Sirius shut his eyes and put one hand on the long line of Remus's leg, drawing it up and hooking it around his waist. Remus tilted back his head and the pale white skin of his neck was unscarred and unfamiliar, the bones of his hips didn't dig into Sirius's side, and his thighs lacked the long, lean muscles that came from running as a wolf once a month--

Remus looked down at him, gasping. "What are you waiting for?" His eyes were without shadow, his face unlined.

Sirius disentangled their limbs and it was one of the hardest things he'd ever done. "I can't," he said. "You're not him." He shut his eyes and wished he could just go home, because even if home was a war and a prison, it was also Harry and his Remus...

The sheets rustled and a weight lifted from the bed. Sirius opened his eyes and watched Remus walk out of the room and shut the door quietly. He rolled out of the bed and crawled on his hands and knees to a patch of moonlight shining in the window. After circling a few times, he transformed into a dog and curled into a ball to sleep.

"You're an Animagus." Remus's voice was calm and unsurprised. Sirius transformed into his human form and sat up. Daylight washed through the window, the morning warm on his back.

Remus sat down beside him and held out a cup of tea, which Sirius gratefully accepted. "It makes sense. He's a wolf once a month, and you're a dog. You don't choose your Animagus form, right?"

Sirius sipped at the tea and burned his tongue. "No, supposedly it picks the animals whose traits you share the most."

Remus nodded. "It must be hard for him. I can't imagine what it's like."

"Yes," Sirius said softly. "But he's the strongest person I've ever met. And I--along with James and Peter--became an Animagus to help him."

"I should have gotten to know them better," Remus said. "James and Peter."

"Not Peter," Sirius said.

"Right, not Peter, he betrayed you. But James."

Sirius smiled. "He was the best friend I ever had. He has a son, Harry, who has all his good traits, and all his mother's good traits, and I'm his godfather."

Remus laughed. "Are you going to pull out pictures to show me?" he asked.

"If I had them, I would."

There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Remus said, "You must miss them," as Sirius said, "I'm sorry about last night."

"Oh." Eyes widened, Remus said, "Don't be. I realized--I may want you, but he needs you."

"He doesn't," Sirius countered. Nothing could be further from the truth. "He survived thirteen years without me."

"Just because he survived doesn't mean he doesn't need you. It just means that you were right, and he is a strong person."

Sirius shook his head doggedly. "I was right, but that doesn't mean--"

"Look," Remus said, holding up his hand. "I've known you all of two days and already I don't want you to go. He's known you most of his life, and you've got more in common than we do. And in a way, he is me, werewolf or not. So trust me on this: he needs you. He might not say it--God knows, if I had to live my life in secret like that I wouldn't be very good at expressing strong emotions--but he does."

The roofs of London seemed suspended in the clouds as Sirius swung his leg over the broom. Beside him, Remus did the same, pointing towards the golden dome of St. Paul's as he said, "We aim for that."

Sirius nodded and kicked off, casting a concealment charm over himself as he did so. Broom flying in London could be a dangerous thing, especially because so many other wizards and witches were also flying around with concealment charms, often leading to collisions, so the two of them stuck close to the walls of buildings and then veered off toward the Thames and onward to the City on as direct a course as possible. The dome loomed before them and then Remus called, "And down!" and they sped off into the dingy street where the Ministry entrance was located.

Not quite understanding Remus's plan, Sirius followed him into the Ministry, past an eerie statue of wizards and witches looking down on a globe with Muggles in it, and to the front desk.

"Hello," Remus said pleasantly to the witch behind the desk. He removed a badge from his robe and presented her with his wand. The badge said, "Remus Lupin, Curator of the Library of Magical History of the Republic of Wales."

The witch behind the counter blinked at it, then up at Remus, and said, "You can't come in here. You need an English badge."

"Well," Remus said apologetically. "Before you send us on our way, you might want to ask a..." He glanced back at Sirius.

"Elias Goodwin. Tell him that James Lupin is here."

Remus raised an eyebrow and then turned back to the woman. "Right, do that. Thank you."

Five minutes later they were met by Goodwin and the witch who had first explained the veil to Sirius.

"You certainly gave us the slip in Wales," Goodwin said, extending his hand to Sirius. "I can understand, you didn't want to be caught, but I'm glad you've seen the error of your ways and turned yourself in. Now we can study this phenomena in earnest and--"

"Excuse me," Remus said with a smile. "I know you're eager to understand what's happened here, but maybe we ought to go speak in your office, so as not to be overheard."

The witch frowned at Remus. "Who are you?"

He handed her his card and she read it. The frown became more pronounced. "Are you related?"

"Cousins." The witch looked dubious, and Remus added, "Like a brother to me, really. He came to me for help after all this began."

"But he came through the veil--" Goodwin began.

"Right," Sirius said, "the veil. We should go down and examine it rather than standing in this lobby."

Goodwin hesitated. "But--"

"Please," Remus said. "This has been a very trying experience. We'd just like to get it over with."

Once inside the lift, they were surrounded by Ministry workers and stood in silence as they rode to the final floor, the Department of Mysteries. Standing in the back of the elevator, Remus reached out and took Sirius's hand and squeezed it briefly before the doors opened. Sirius looked at Remus and put his free hand on his wand, and Remus nodded, once, and then led the way out of the lift. Still in silence, they followed the other two down a flight of stairs and through a circular room into another, darker room. The veil stood on its dais in the center, tattered and blowing in an unseen breeze.

"Well," Remus said. "This is it." He looked up at Sirius and their eyes met again. Sirius edged his way toward the dais as Remus continued, "My cousin James and I have been trying to figure out just what could have happened that he should wind up coming through this veil into the basement of the Ministry."

"He said that he came from another reality," said the witch. She started to look at Sirius, but Remus stepped forward and seized her arm.

"The trouble is," he said in a low voice, "James is given to paranoid delusions. Always has been, unfortunately. No one knows what to do with him. He's got this crazy idea that London was never invaded in the war."

"He told me," the witch said, relaxing.

"We thought it might be because he came through the veil," Goodwin added, looking very disappointed. "We've learned through experimentation that you have to be dead or dying or in a similar state for it to accept you. We can't possibly understand what happened with him."

"Neither can I," Remus said, looking away from her to Sirius. "Were you hit by a spell, James?" he called, speaking slowly as if to a child.

"Yes," Sirius said. His fingers were on the stone. "A Stunning Spell."

"That doesn't make sense," Goodwin began, but by then Remus had raised his wand and the other wizard's voice died in his throat.

Sirius grabbed the veil and scrambled onto the dais. He twisted around, ready to fall, just as Remus raised his wand and yelled, "Stupefy!"

He tumbled out onto unyielding stone with all his muscles tingling and rolled across the floor away from the veil. For several minutes he lay in the chamber, gasping into the deep silence, but then he sat up and crawled across the floor to a set of battle-scarred steps. Behind him, the veil fluttered in the breeze of hidden centuries. Sirius staggered to his feet and left the room, passing out into another chamber. He wondered if he could Apparate again, and closed his eyes so he wouldn't splinch himself when he tried.

When he opened them, he was on the sidewalk outside the Ministry of Magic. He grabbed his robe and drew the hood over his face as quickly as he could, then began to walk rapidly down the street. If this was the correct reality, then he was a wanted man again... and there he was, trapped in the middle of London... He ducked into an alley and Apparated again, finding that he traveled a little further. Each time, keeping his face out of sight in the folds of his hood, he managed to cover a bit more ground, until he was standing outside where Number 12 Grimmauld Place lay hidden.

He didn't know yet if he was in the correct place, but when he stepped forward the door appeared. He had lost the witch's wand, so he rang the bell, and through the thick door he heard his mother's voice start screaming and someone running down the stairs. What if this is another reality, he thought suddenly, and my mother isn't dead and is going to burst through that door in a minute? What if--

Molly Weasley opened the door, a pot of tea in her hand. For a moment, neither moved, and then he lowered his hood and she dropped the pot and screamed.

"Molly, Molly, shhh," Sirius gasped, stepping over the broken pottery and through the door. "It's all right."

She watched with wide eyes as he shut the door and then stepped into the foyer and yanked the curtains across the portrait of his mother. "We thought you were dead," she said incredulously.

"I know," Sirius said, turning to look at her. "How long have I been gone?"

"It's July 10," Molly whispered. "Where did you... how..."

"July 10!" Sirius said. "What happened in the Department of Mysteries? Is Harry all right? Is Remus?"

"They're fine," Molly whispered. She reached behind her and grabbed for the doorframe. "As fine as they can be." She paused and added again, "We thought you were dead."

"Where are they?" Sirius demanded.

"Harry is at his aunt and uncle's. Remus was in the kitchen when I came to answer the--" Molly's face drained of what little color it had had left as her eyes focused on something over her shoulder. Sirius spun around to see--

"Sirius?" Remus stood there: white-faced, hair more gray than brown, lines etched deeply into his face, and his eyes, dark and deep above purple bruises. Sirius had never seen anyone so beautiful in his entire life.

"Remus!" he yelled, launching himself onto the other man, whose arms flew up and fit themselves around his neck as if they'd been made to hold him.

"Sirius?" Remus repeated, his voice with its faint Welsh accent wavering out of control. "Is it you?"

Sirius buried his face in Remus's neck and smiled into his warm skin. "I'm back."