Rating: PG
Word Count: 2054
Characters: Sirius, Mr & Mrs Lupin, Natalie Lupin, Two Muggles, Dementors

The Knight Bus. Sirius almost laughed out loud at the familiar, long-forgotten sight. Harry would be safe. He breathed a sigh of relief as soon as he allowed himself to stop running. The Knight Bus would be able to take Harry anywhere in the Wizarding world. He would be safe among friends for the duration of the summer.

This left Sirius free to ... do what? he wondered. It was still over three weeks before he needed to be at Hogwarts. He expected that a friendly-looking dog might be able to find a ride for at least part of the way. He had some time to spare.

Remus. The thought came unbidden to his mind. There was now nothing and no excuses left preventing him from spending a few days at least looking for Remus. He felt the fear rising in him once again, but he stiffened his resolve. You're on an adventure, Old Boy, he told himself. Show a little backbone.

Tentatively, he reached out with all his senses as he had done while searching for Harry. At first he could find nothing. Fighting down the panic this caused, he forced himself to relax and try again. He closed his eyes and turned his shaggy head from side to side.

It was less than a spark when he found it, but it was definitely there. Sirius breathed a doggy sigh of relief. Remus was alive at the very least. And if he was alive, then he was Somewhere and Sirius could find him.

The problem with this sort of searching was that the sense of a person gave no directional indication at all; only a sense of "nearer" or "farther away". It was well enough for short distance searches such as finding Harry in a single town, but was unlikely to help him find Remus in under a week, even assuming he was in England, which he might not be.

Instead, Sirius set out to check the old familiar haunts, just on the off-chance. He was already near London, so the logical place to begin was the flat they had once shared. There was only a very remote possibility that Remus had stayed there. He skulked and slunk through the suburbs of Greater London all that night, avoiding densely populated areas. A large dog roaming free in the city was likely to draw unwelcome and unhelpful attention of the Men With Nets variety.

It was after dawn when he finally reached the dilapidated and unfashionable street where he had once lived. But of course Remus was not there. Sirius had known he would not be. His spark still registered as distant in Sirius's mind. Even the building where their flat had been was gone, replaced by a boring-looking office block. Sirius whined regretfully, but did not linger there.

He turned north after that, figuring he might try Remus's family's home, if they were still alive and if they still lived in the same place. He thought it unlikely that Remus would be with them.

They had been disappointed, to say they least, when they had learned that their son was, to put it delicately, unlikely to provide them with grandchildren. A rift was created in the family that had not healed as long as Sirius had known them. Remus had not precisely been disowned, but his family's strong opinions about such things made visiting uncomfortable, and he had not been in contact with them much.

Remus loved his family, and their lack of acceptance had not only hurt him deeply, but had shaken him to the core. Of all the people in his life, his family were the only ones he had been certain would unreservedly give their blessing to his choice of partner. After all, they had been nothing short of wonderful about his being a werewolf since he was a small child.

But when he had finally brought Sirius home to meet his parents officially during the summer between their sixth and seventh years, his announcement had been met with tears from his Muggle mother and a stony, "I don't accept that," on the part of his wizard father. They had refused to discuss the matter any further. Sirius had been pointedly directed to the guest bedroom, and everyone had been chillingly polite for the rest of the week-long visit.

Remus's younger sister Natalie had been only thirteen at the time, and had not entirely understood what was going on. She hid in her room a lot and burst into tears at the dinner table one night.

Natalie was a Squib and had not attended Hogwarts. Remus had missed her dreadfully. She had kept in touch by Owl Post frequently (Remus had saved up and bought her her own owl), but while she was sympathetic to her brother's distress once she understood what was going on, she seemed to side with her parents on the matter. It had been she who had explained years later in a rare revisitation of the topic that, while his parents could accept he was a werewolf through no fault of his own, they very much viewed his lifestyle as a conscious choice with which they could not agree. They kept hoping he would see the error of his ways.

Sirius had been disappointed too. He had always liked Mr and Mrs Lupin, and they had always been very warm towards their son's friends -- almost grateful, which was not all that surprising under the circumstances. They had been his favourite parents after Mr and Mrs Potter. The loss of their good wishes had not cut him as deeply as it had cut Remus, but it had cut him nonetheless.

Remembering all these things, he had not been paying attention to where he was going, and it was only the realisation that his surroundings were familiar that jolted him back to the present.

He raised his hackles and bared his teeth instinctively. He did not like this place. But why? It was a rundown cul-de-sac in the northern part of London, crowded with shabby houses left over from the last century, shouldering for breathing space. The street sign caught his eye. Grimmauld Place. The human groan emerged as a growl. Home sweet home, he thought.

Reluctantly, he approached the home he had not seen since he was sixteen. It looked just as shabby as the others, but it always had, even under the ownership of his proud parents. The shabbiness was a front to stem any Muggle curiosity about the place. However, it now looked as though no one had lived there for some time.

He dimly recalled receiving notice from the Ministry while he was in Azkaban informing him that his mother had died, but he could not remember how long ago it had been. He wondered who owned the house now. Whoever it was, he knew that no good could come of encountering any of the remaining Blacks, and he did not linger.

As expected, there was no hint of Remus at the Lupin ancestral home, though his parents were still there and very much alive. Sirius felt some qualms about begging for his dinner there, but the Lupins were quite willing to attend to the needs of a friendly stray.

It was a jolt seeing them again. Teenagers do not tend to look for a resemblance to a lover in the face of the older generation. It struck him now just how much Remus looked like both his parents. His father's nose and chin, his mother's ears, long lashes and the shape of her skull. That tilt of the head belonged to his father as well, and the laugh was his mother's. It was unsettling enough that he did not wish to stay long, though he was there long enough to see framed photos of Natalie with her husband and their disturbingly familiar-looking ten-year-old son.

There was only one photo of Remus. He was five years old in it. A gap-toothed grin on his face as his smiling parents helped him awkwardly to hold his baby sister. It was the face of a child who had never heard the word "werewolf", and it made Sirius's heart ache to see it. He turned away and set off again without looking back.

When he left the Lupins' home it was mid-August and very much time to start taking his journey north to Hogwarts more seriously. He was still no closer to discovering Remus's whereabouts, but there would be time for that later, he supposed, once he had dealt with the matter of Peter Pettigrew.

He was still only just starting to get used to the idea of having his whole life in front of him again. The average wizarding life span was somewhere in the neighbourhood of 120 years, which meant that he had almost a century ahead of him to make up for all the time lost in Azkaban. Plenty of time to find Remus, make him understand what had happened and perhaps, just perhaps, make a new start of things. With a regretful sigh he turned his nose northwards again.

The journey took him longer than he had anticipated. He had wasted too much time in his search for Remus, he knew. He only hoped that this small self-indulgence had not cost him his chance of finding Peter before it was too late.

He covered as much ground as he could, mostly traveling by night now to avoid attention. He paused to eat or sleep only when absolutely necessary, but the first of September came and went before he even managed to cross the border into Scotland.

If he had not worn himself into a state of complete exhaustion, he might have made it to Hogwarts without ever once being spotted, but his desperation caused him to make a single, near-fatal mistake not far outside Langholm.

He still slept as a man when he thought he could risk it, his human dreams being so much richer than their canine counterparts, but two nights before he reached the school he chose his sleeping place with less care than he should have. Collapsing in exhaustion, he did not bother to check the wooded area he had chosen for human habitation, and perhaps because he was so tired or perhaps because he was dreaming of Remus, he slept too deeply to hear the footsteps of the approaching Muggle. It was only half an hour later when two sets of footsteps and agitated whispers could be heard on the nearby path that he came awake with a start.

He slipped forms at once, slinking quietly into the underbrush and pricking up his sharp ears to catch their conversation.

"Saw him with me own eyes, officer. Asleep he was, under a tree," whispered a man's voice.

"Perhaps you'd better stay back here while I investigate," said a second voice in a tone that suggested the speaker would rather be doing just about anything else. "They do say he's armed and extremely dangerous."

"There's a reward, though, isn't there?" asked the first voice, and Sirius could hear the tinge of greed.

"Aye," said the second man. "Still, carefully does it. Reward does you no good if you get yourself killed by a madman."

Sirius did not need to hear any more. Mentally cursing himself, he made a quiet exit.

The repercussions of his carelessness came haunting him before sundown the next day. He felt them before he saw them: Dementors -- three of them -- gliding silently through the green, leafy wood. They would have looked out of place, but for the fact that everything around them seemed to wither and turn gray in their presence. The birds began to sing again only once they were long gone. Sirius crouched silently, eyes closed, his dark fur blending with the shadows until they had passed.

Nor were they the last he encountered. The closer he got to Hogwarts, the more frequently they appeared. So they are waiting for me, he thought. They think they know what I am about. I wonder if Harry knows? I wonder if he is frightened of me? When he slept, cold fingers brushed his doggy dreams a dozen times or more. He awoke shivering, but knowing the Dementors' presence meant one very important thing: he was nearing his goal.

Survivor's Guilt: Padfoot's Tale © 2005 Skjaere