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Command of the What


Professor McGonagall was in her office when Sirius got to the Transfiguration wing after bumping into Peter on the stairs. He stood behind one of the suits of armor - the one he bewitched to sing to Professor Minnie each year - and stared at the door of the office, trying to come up with a plan to get her out of that ruddy office so he could use the Floo Network. He looked about up and down the hallway, spotting a small cluster of Hufflepuff first years at the end of the hall, lollygagging about before heading off to their next class.

Sirius frowned, “Sorry you lot but you’re gonna have to be scapegoats.” He drew his wand and waved it.

There was a heart-stopping shriek from down the hall and the cluster of students broke apart like shrapnel as a great bang erupted down the hall, and one of them exploded into the shape of a billy goat. Loud, squealing bleating cries filled the hall and the student-goat panicked and raced down the hall, shrieking as they went, knocking into a coat of arms. The armor fell to it’s side, slamming into the next one… and he into the next… and the next… so that the suits of armor were falling sideways one by one by one in a domino effect all the way down the hall, their helmets rolling off and banging about. Professor McGonagall’s office door slammed open, “What in the name of Merlin’s majestic beard is going on!” she hollered in her thick Scottish accent. She glowered about left to right, then noticed the goat at the end of the hallway, let out a cry of dismay, and rushed off to go investigate.

Sirius ducked quickly across the hall and through McGonagall’s closing office doorway, unseen.

He could hear Professor McGonagall in the hallway shouting, could hear the goat bleating loudly, students laughing and screaming… He ran to the fireplace, grabbed the little jar of floo powder from her mantel, and chucked it into the fire quickly, not willing to spare even a moment. “Number 12! Grimmauld Place!” he said, stepping in with a lime green poof! and he was gone.

Falling through the floo network… spinning, passing countless fireplaces in the tesseract… on and on until he felt himself falling into one of them and he was suddenly upright, tripping over a log and hit the black stone tiled floor of the kitchen.

He rushed to push himself up from the floor, instantly in defense mode. He drew his wand and held it at shoulder level, aimed and ready… He stepped gingerly forward, careful to keep his shoes from squeaking in the absolute silence of Number 12.

There was a shouting voice… a voice that sounded like absolute agony… Sirius felt his stomach twist. “I’m comin’ Rey,” he whispered and he started forward more quickly. He paused in the entryway by the door, listening for a moment… and then he saw a flash of green light beneath the frame of the door of his mother’s parlor and his heart very nearly topped.

But green light was only caused by the killing curse…

He ran.

Sirius Black had never run so hard in all his life.

He tumbled up the steps, smacking his face on the flight landing, but barely noticed it. “Reducto!” he shouted at the door and the handle and lock blew off and the door swung open and he stepped inside, shooting stunners as he went - a blaze of red flashing lights, eyes squeezed tight, shooting purely on instinct, and he ducked down at the last moment as his own stunner only just missed him, and realized there was nobody in the room, but the fireplace flickered as though recently used…

And he walked forward and his foot landed on something and he stopped and looked down..

There on the parlor floor, pale, ghostly white and quite dead, his jaw slack, blood dripping from his mouth was James Potter.

Sirius felt as though the entire earth ground to a halt, stopping on it’s axis… everything except for him that is, and the force of the stopping of the earth’s orbit was exactly how much force he fell to the ground with, the breath leaving his lungs. “No,” he choked, “No. NO!” The anguish in his voice ripped his throat as the word roared from his chest, so warped with pain that it wrenched the gut of anyone who heard it… “JAMES!!! JAMES! NO!” Sirius was delirious with the agony that clutched his mind…

James Potter lay on, still, unsmiling…

There was laughter from behind him. Low, rumbling laughter that seemed to traverse around the room, like a breeze or a chill, and Sirius felt it come closer to him… then go further away…

Fearful, Sirius reached out to clutch onto James’s robes… his fingers closing ‘round smoke that poofed up from between his knuckles. “What.. what?” he blinked through the tears… and James’s body disappeared in a great gasp of smoke…

Still reeling from the sight of his dead best mate, Sirius scrambled about in the midst of the smoke, his palms on the floor, grasping, feeling, desperately clawing the emptiness before him. The cackling laughter continued to circle and wobble closer and further, closer and further… taunting him… Sirius swung out into the air at it, but didn’t connect with anything at all. “You can’t have his body!” he yelled, anger swelling up inside him. “GIVE HIM BACK! GIVE HIM HERE!!! YOU BASTARDS MIGHT’VE TAKEN HIS BLOODY LIFE BUT YOU CAN’T HAVE HIS RUDDY BODY TOO! EXPULSO!” he waved his wand manically, the spell striking a wall - the next broke a bookshelf, a shower of books falling to the floor... - a third slammed into a black cabinet and knocked several items emblazoned with the horrid Black Family Crest upon them….

He was so busy reacting that Sirius never once paused to wonder how James Potter had come to be in the library in his parents house, dead.

“SHOW YOUR FACE, COWARDS!” he shouted, “SHOW YOUR FACE!”

Druella Black suddenly appeared, dragging the invisibility cloak from her bushy-haired head and dropping it upon the floor. “Just was playin’ about with some of your ickle boyfriends belongings,” she explained. “Found this in his rucksack. Interesting, this is.” She ran her fingers over the material.

Sirius didn’t wait. “Crucio!” he shouted aiming at Druella.

Protego,” she said with a lazy flick of her wand and the spell bounced back and hit Sirius with a force like a large electrical shock, though not at all as bad as some of the cruciatuses that he’d felt from Walburga’s wand. It was enough to knock him from his feet though, and he landed on his back a couple yards from where he’d stood. Druella laughed, and she danced about. “Immobulus,” she sang out, and Sirius felt his body go heavy, impossible to move. That was why she’d faded in and out, he realized. “That was a cute little unforgivable, my nephew. Was that your first time giving it a go?” She grinned, “You have to mean it. You have to mean it with all of your heart if you wish to perform an unforgivable curse.” She leaned right into his face and held up her wand and silently restored his motor skills - though only to his face and voice.

It was too quiet without the talking.

“Give me back my friends,” Sirius hissed, gritting his teeth.

Druella grinned and her cackle multiplied.

“Are they both dead then?” Sirius asked, fighting to keep his voice steady.

“Do you want to see your boyfriend?” Druella asked, her eyes sparkling. “We can arrange for that.” She leaned in even closer. “I think he’d rather enjoy a ickle snack.”

Sirius’s eyes scrambled about the room - but there were no windows, at least not that weren’t covered by those horrid green curtains that his mother liked. She hated the sun. But window or not, Sirius had a feeling there had been the moonrise…

She wrenched him up from the floor.

Druella dragged Sirius to the kitchen and wrenched open the basement door. The basement of Number 12 Grimmauld Place was dark and horrid. From where they stood in the frame of the door, Sirius could see that the lower half of the wood steps that led into the dark below had been destroyed so that it was three steps and then the void. “Here doggy, doggy,” Druella laughed. There was suddenly a horrible growling bark and there below were two savage looking wolves, drooling and snapping toward the stair… Greyback and Remus, transformed.

Sirius’s stomach knotted up.

“Hungry little doggies…” sing-songed Druella. She cackled. “It’s too bad that you need to be in one piece to collect our galleons. They look like they’d enjoy an ickle snack, don’t they?”

Sirius stared into the yellow eyes of Remus Lupin’s wolf.

Suddenly, there was a sound behind them and Druella turned in surprise.

“LET HIM GO!” Peter Pettigrew’s voice echoed about the room. “BY THE COMMAND OF THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX!”

Druella stared at him. “The command of the what?”

Sirius felt a surge of hope.

Druella’s eyes widened in surprise as a stream of teenagers come forth from the floo. Peter crossed the room quickly, followed nearly immediately by a newly arrived Frank. “Release him!” Frank demanded, too, and both boys raised their wands as three girls popped into the room, followed by several boys, and another girl, and Druella felt a panic rush up in her. What in hell was this? She wondered and she looked at Sirius Black, whose eyes had rolled back in an attempt to see them, his feet dangerously close to the edge of the stairs...

Below, the werewolves growled.

“You wish for me to let him go?” Druella asked, her eyes twinkling.

“Immediately!” Frank replied.

Druella glanced down at the waiting werewolves, their jaws lashing and spittle flying from their jaws below… “As you wish,” she said, and she hurled Sirius forward with a wrench of her wrist and plunged him over the edge of the stairs… down into the basement.

Both Peter and Frank’s jaws dropped and Frank started to rush forward - as though hoping to catch Sirius - but Druella drew her wand and shot a jet of white sparks harshly at his feet, the floor bursting where it struck and Frank had to sort of dance back as Druella laughed evilly. Her hands now free, she pushed up her sleeves and said, “Now let’s have a little fun ourselves, shall we?” She waved her wand and a burst of energy flew out of it, like a shield, except the way it moved blasted each and every one of the members of the Order from their feet, knocking them all backwards across the floor of the kitchen in Number 12 Grimmauld Place.