Chapter 41
"Harry... Harry Potter... you really do look a lot like your parents..." the tall, but extremely thin and morbidly pale man greeted me. His words were jumbled and awkward, as if he were in a slight stupor. He had a week's worth of stubble on his face and faint bags under his eyes. His overall appearance was a bit disheveled and... quite unequivocally complemented by the faint "aroma" of fresh booze.
Even despite his rather decent clothes made from high-quality, well-matched fabrics, my godfather looked almost like some kind of vagabond. Only his perfectly groomed hair testified to the fact that the man had at least tried to prepare for our meeting. It was just a pity that in the end, he didn't have enough in him for anything other than getting his hair in order, but... it was at least something. A decent hairstyle transformed the skinny man from an ordinary drunkard vagrant into a fairly sleek, albeit life-battered, wizard.
"Sirius Black... Now you look absolutely nothing like those photos from the *Daily Prophet*. St. Mungo's Hospital has definitely done you some good," I said. After a quick assessment of his appearance, it was my turn to greet the man standing awkwardly before me, who still hadn't found the strength to say anything else to his godson.
*An awkward meeting,* I mentally smirked, noting to myself how most of my anxieties were gradually dissipating. Despite everything, I didn't sense any aggression, madness, or even lack of restraint from Black. So, the first impression was already better than my worst predictions, anyway.
"You can say that again," Sirius chuckled quietly, his voice muffled in response to my remark. "Those sadists from our hospital could get anyone back on their feet... Though I wouldn't want to go back to them even under the threat of death."
"They don't let you booze?" I looked at the man with a slight taunt, using only a highly sarcastic and understanding smile to let the recent prisoner know exactly what I thought about his boozy breath. Even if I didn't approve, I was quite ready to tolerate such antics from my almost-guardian. After everything he had been through, I could have expected much worse reactions to his newly found freedom.
"That too..." Sirius chuckled softly, closing his faded eyes for a moment. Then he relaxed his shoulders a bit and started to look at me a little calmer. There was no hint of any fear or even a certain hidden houndedness in his gaze. However, it still didn't add much talkativeness to the man, which was why our silent standing on the platform—slightly apart from the main crowd of wizards meeting their offspring—was starting to drag on.
"Okay, fine, this is really becoming absurdly awkward," I exhaled lightly, stopping my scrutiny of my own godfather and deciding to finally seize the initiative in this strange conversation. "How about we just introduce ourselves and get out of here, away from all this noise?"
"I'm all for it, but... you better start. I'm still a bit unaccustomed to talking to people... and children," the black-haired wizard nodded at me cheerfully, immediately drooping a little in the process of admitting his own helplessness and... social awkwardness?
"Alright, then I really will introduce myself first... I'm Harry Potter. Twelve years old, I study at Hogwarts in Ravenclaw. I just finished my second year. I adore magic in practically all its manifestations... well, except for Potions. I love sports, but not Quidditch. I prefer Muggle team games and... I would say extreme broom flying. I hate when people distract me from training or try to impose their will on me. And also oatmeal cooked with water. I don't like that either," I drawled the words with a slight smirk on my lips, once again raising my godfather's mood slightly with my words and providing an example of how he could introduce himself to me.
"Um, not bad... And very clear," the man replied to my smile, immediately deciding to introduce himself to me in a similar way. "I'm Sirius Black, recently turned thirty-three, studied at Hogwarts in Gryffindor, and was a good friend of your parents, but... damn, well, you must know from the news how all that ended up and... I spent the last eleven years in Azkaban. In magic, I most value fast combat charms and dueling spell combinations. I used to be a good duelist, yeah... I also love Muggle bikes and good alcohol. I don't like rats or traitors... though I don't like oatmeal for breakfast either."
"Hmph, well, it means we already have quite a bit in common," I chuckled lightly at his last clarification, nodding amicably to the awkward mage. "I think we'll be able to get along just fine, Sirius. I can call you that, right?"
"Only call me that," the dark-haired man nodded quickly and even a bit sharply. "Or by my last name... The main thing is no unnecessary formalities. I hate it when people call me 'sir'... I'm not that old yet."
"Nope, you're exactly old enough to be called 'sir'," I snorted mockingly, making Sirius wince in a disgruntled and even indignant manner. "Anyway, I get it... I'll keep it casual with you. That's what I've been doing from the very beginning anyway... By the way, are we going to have something like lunch? Or do you have other plans for today?"
"Oh? Of course, you must be properly starved after the trip..." the wizard finally perked up, seemingly completely letting go of his awkwardness and a certain timidity in interacting with me. "How about we dash over to my place for now, and there... we'll get you settled in and then head to some Muggle restaurant?"
"Sounds like a plan," I shrugged lightly, admitting to myself that meeting my godfather was truly going nowhere near as badly as I might have expected.
Yes, this overgrown lug had apparently woken up literally half an hour before my arrival—and this was despite the fact that it was actually early evening outside. He had shown up to the meeting with a serious hangover, and in general, he didn't give me the impression of a person capable of looking after a child. Truth be told, Sirius could use the supervision of a "real adult" himself, but...
I wasn't exactly a normal twelve-year-old boy either, so we could communicate... well, almost as equals. In the sense that Sirius paid absolutely no attention to my physical age, primarily trying to simply make friends, and only then thinking about the fact that he was actually about to take guardianship over me.
A father-and-son relationship, even a very nominal one, was definitely not going to work out for us, but... we could probably still become frankly weird friends. I realized this precisely at the moment when this boy trapped in an adult's body, having brought me to a sort of family restaurant for an early dinner, conspiratorially offered to let me try some wine or something else lightly alcoholic...
Sirius didn't seem to see an ordinary child in me at all. Or maybe he just thought that twelve-year-old and sixteen-year-old teenagers were more or less the same thing. It was hard to say for sure what was going on in the skinny mage's head, but in the end, I didn't refuse a couple of glasses of wine that day.
And it wasn't due to any particular desire on my part. Even in my past life, I drank so rarely that by the end of the year I could easily count the number of my drinking sessions on the fingers of both hands. In this life, I had completely lost the habit of alcohol, not in any particular hurry to reacquaint myself with it, but...
Sirius's offer was just too tempting. Besides, I felt that such a drinking session, even a purely nominal one, in the company of my sort-of-guardian would do our relationship some good. Fortunately, the last of the Blacks did possess some semblance of self-control and responsibility. And he did take my age into account after all, not particularly pushing our shared alcoholism. He didn't even get wasted himself on the day we met.
*For which all honor and praise to him... Otherwise, judging by the state of his house, one could rightfully assume he just boozes away in here without ever waking up,* I winced mentally, ultimately remaining not particularly pleased with the state of my new dwelling.
Sirius dragged me to his family nest—the house at Number 12, Grimmauld Place, which I had heard of even in my past life. I was expecting truly great things from the place, but... in reality, my new home was frankly abandoned and even dilapidated, despite all the magic that permeated literally everything in this house, swirling in the air and concentrating in the walls.
In terms of its magical atmosphere, I quite liked the Black family manor. Breathing in this house felt somehow particularly light and free... Even if the ubiquitous dust, dirt, and mustiness quite strongly spoiled this feeling of freshness in the lungs. And the whole bunch of magical pests and parasites that had settled in this place certainly didn't do my mood any favors.
Cleaning up my new place of residence promised to be quite an ordeal for Sirius and me. Although the latter didn't seem to care much about such trifles. Except that right towards the evening, he advised me not to meddle for now in... well, practically ninety percent of the rooms in the house—because they still housed a whole bunch of not entirely legal, dark, and downright dangerous artifacts.
More precisely, Sirius *assumed* that something like that could be lying around under the guise of even the most ordinary things. He had only recently been discharged from St. Mungo's, dedicating almost all his free time to hopeless drinking, and still hadn't even conducted a basic reconnaissance in his own home, let alone an inventory. While I met this with a healthy dose of understanding, I... still couldn't help but be irritated by such irresponsibility.
Fortunately, Sirius himself turned out to be surprisingly suggestible and... somewhat even an obedient mage. I mean, the very next morning, the moment I so much as hinted that we couldn't go on living like this and that the house really needed a deep clean, slash light renovation, the last of the Blacks immediately threw up a near-military salute and was ready to carry out the mission set before him.
Okay, fine, I'm exaggerating a bit there. There were absolutely no military mannerisms to be observed in this disheveled mage at all, but he still flared up with enthusiasm quite quickly and thoroughly. He simultaneously handed me the leading role in this whole affair and simply started asking where we should even begin and what we ultimately wanted to achieve.
Sirius himself had absolutely no particular idea of what his own house was supposed to look like. He didn't really like the place in general, staying in it only on some whim and out of a desire to "show off" a cool spot to me, where many generations of his not-particularly-beloved-yet-still-ancestors had resided before him.
*The sheer number of loose screws in this mage's head simply knows no bounds,* I came to the quite obvious conclusion then, immediately acknowledging that Sirius Black definitely wasn't completely crazy. And therefore, it was possible to work with him and even be friends. The main thing was to pull him back from unnecessary adventures in time and direct where he should put all that boiling energy inside him.
Otherwise, without outside supervision on my part, this man apparently intended to just drink himself into a stupor, worsening his already less-than-stellar mental and physical condition after a long stint in Azkaban. But this way, things actually seemed alright.
He got busy with work, started slowly bringing his—or rather, now our—house into order. He introduced me to the constantly screaming portrait of his deceased mother—and then together we figured out how to shut it up using a clever sound-dampening curtain. He told me about the grumpy house-elf, allocated a separate room for my cat—and overall managed to get along pretty well with my cat, despite his canine Animagus form. He gifted me a few "cool" but not entirely legal artifacts... As soon as he found them in the bins of his own home and deemed them not dangerous enough to immediately toss them into the specially designated room for that stuff.
Generally, he had initially wanted to throw away or destroy the majority of the "dark artifacts," but after I said that was kind of uncool, he immediately changed his mind... deciding to just dump all these goods into a sort of storage closet for now, where no outsider would ever be able to sneak in. After my prodding, Sirius even decided not to let the house-elf in there, promising at the same time to properly catalog all these not-so-legal goods in the future and tell me what they actually were.
Black didn't particularly object to my interest in such things. More precisely, he *did* object and was himself very, very much against all dark magic, but if it was for educational purposes and for the sake of an opportunity to properly show off in front of his beloved godson... In short, manipulating my godfather turned out to be terrifyingly easy.
Even though I tried not to overdo it with this, I was surprisingly quickly infused with a sincere sympathy for Sirius. He was a good guy. He had endured far too much and was generally stuck somewhere in his late teens, but still good. And in terms of a guardian, he seemed to me a much better candidate than the Dursleys, or especially Dumbledore. Although we still had some clashes in that regard. And we argued and fought about my betrothal like nobody's business...
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