The trial was during the third week of July and was, by every account, the most significant public legal proceeding in wizarding Britain since the Death Eater trials after Voldemort's first fall.
The Daily Prophet covered it with the specific energy of a publication that understood it was witnessing something historic. The coverage was extensive and not entirely accurate in its details but accurate in its essential shape: a man had been sent to Azkaban without a trial, had served twelve years, and had been innocent the entire time. The mechanism of that injustice — the system that had permitted it, the people who had been too certain and too quick and too unwilling to look carefully — was present in the coverage in the specific uncomfortable way of something that a lot of people had contributed to and no one wanted to fully own.
Amelia Bones built the case with the thoroughness of someone who understood it needed to be unassailable. Pettigrew's veritaserum testimony, transcribed and verified. The magical evidence analysis from the Auror department. Witness accounts from the night of the street — Muggle witnesses, carefully Obliviated at the time, whose memories the Aurors had since restored under controlled conditions with the specific care of people who understood that these memories were evidence. The account of what had actually happened, laid out piece by piece with the precision of a woman who found injustice personally offensive and intended to address it as completely as possible.
Sirius Black had not been in the courtroom when the verdict was delivered. He had been in St. Mungo's, where he had been since three days after his release from the holding cell where he'd spent the last two weeks of the investigation. Twelve years of Dementor exposure did not reverse itself because the legal situation changed. His body and his mind had work to do that no verdict could accelerate.
The Wizengamot voted.
The majority was larger than it needed to be, which was its own statement — not a narrow exoneration, not a reluctant acknowledgment, but a verdict that was as clear as the evidence that produced it.
Sirius Black was free.
The Daily Prophet ran the headline on the front page the following morning. His father read it at the breakfast table without saying anything, and then set it down carefully, and drank his tea.
His mother did not read it at the table. She read it later, alone, in the garden, and when she came back inside her eyes were slightly red and she went immediately to making something for lunch with the focused efficiency of someone converting feeling into action, which was her consistent approach to both joy and grief.
He read it once and set it down and thought about a man in St. Mungo's with clear grey eyes who had survived twelve years of something that was designed to make survival impossible, and who was currently in a hospital bed being fed nutrient potions and sleeping in a room without Dementors in it.
He thought: that's one thing made right.
He knew it wasn't the only thing that needed making right. He knew the list was long. But this was one item on it, and it was done, and it had mattered.
Harry met Sirius during the third week of July.
He went with him.
St. Mungo's had the atmosphere of all hospitals — a particular quality of suspended time, of lives paused at their most difficult junctures, the specific smell of magical medicine that was not unpleasant but was unmistakably clinical. The ward where Sirius was recovering was at the end of a corridor where the light came from windows rather than enchanted sources, and the quiet there had a different quality than the quiet in the rest of the building — more deliberate, more carefully maintained.
Sirius was sitting up when they arrived.
Thin. That was the first and most immediate thing. Thin in the way of someone whose body was in the process of remembering what it was supposed to weigh and hadn't finished yet. His hair was long and his face had the specific quality of someone who had been through something that left marks that recovery could address but not entirely erase.
But his eyes were clear.
That was the second thing, and the more important one. The grey eyes that had survived twelve years of Azkaban and come out the other side still fundamentally themselves — that clarity was one of the more remarkable things he had seen since arriving in this world.
Harry stopped in the doorway.
Sirius looked at Harry.
Whatever happened in that moment happened without words and was not his to narrate. He stood slightly back and let it happen, because some things needed room and his job in this particular moment was to take up as little of it as possible.
Harry crossed the room and sat in the chair beside the bed and said something too quiet to hear from the doorway, and Sirius said something back, and the conversation that followed was not something he watched closely because it was not his.
He waited in the corridor and thought about other things and gave them the time they needed.
When Harry came out twenty minutes later his eyes were slightly red and his jaw was set in the way it got when he'd felt something significant and had decided to carry it quietly.
"He wants to meet you," Harry said.
He went in.
Sirius looked at him with the assessing attention of someone who had been a very good judge of character before Azkaban and was relearning the skill with the self-awareness of someone who understood the calibration might need adjusting.
"Ron Weasley," Sirius said. His voice had the texture of someone whose vocal cords were still remembering regular use. "Harry's told me what you did. In the Chamber."
"Harry did most of it," he said.
"That's what Harry said about you," Sirius said, with the ghost of something that was almost a grin. "You're both wrong, from what I can tell." He paused. "And your family's ward found Pettigrew."
"The ward found him," he said. "I didn't know it was going to."
Sirius looked at him carefully. "But you weren't surprised."
He met the grey eyes. They were, as advertised, clear. Very clear. The kind of clear that had survived twelve years of something designed to destroy clarity and had come through more perceptive than most people managed without that experience.
"I was surprised," he said carefully. "I didn't know about the Animagus detection. My parents had it added without telling me." He paused. "I had noticed that Scabbers seemed wrong. I didn't know why."
Sirius was quiet for a moment. He appeared to be deciding something. "Good instincts," he said finally, the same thing he'd said in the version of this conversation he'd been preparing for.
"I'm working on it," he said.
A silence. Then Sirius said, with the simple directness of someone who had been stripped of the ability to be anything other than direct: "Thank you."
He didn't deflect it. "You're welcome," he said, and meant it completely.
"He wants to live with me," Sirius said. Not Harry wasn't there for this part of the conversation, but there was something in the way Sirius said it that suggested he needed to say it to someone other than Harry. "When I'm well enough. When I have a proper place." He looked at the window. "I don't know if the Ministry will allow it. The blood protection "
"One thing at a time," he said. "You're free. You're getting better." He paused. "Whatever comes after, comes after. But Harry should have the choice. Actually have it."
Sirius looked at him.
"Not just in theory," he said.
Sirius was quiet for a long moment. Then: "You're an unusual thirteen-year-old, Ron Weasley."
"The memory charm," he said. "Apparently."
Sirius made a sound that was, unmistakably, a laugh — brief and slightly rough but real. "Yes," he said. "Apparently."
The owl arrived the same day.
It came by a handsome tawny owl that deposited a small package on the breakfast table with professional efficiency and then waited with the expectant patience of something anticipating a reply. The package contained a voucher from Eeylops Owl Emporium, for one owl of his choosing, and with it a note in handwriting that was slightly unsteady but was clearly trying.
Ron Weasley,
Harry tells me you've been without an owl your whole time at Hogwarts, which strikes me as a significant oversight on someone's part. Consider this a correction.
Sirius Black
He read it twice. Then he folded it carefully and put it in the locked compartment of his trunk alongside the notebook and the basilisk materials, because it felt like something worth keeping.
He wrote back on the waiting tawny owl — brief, warm, the tone of someone genuinely glad that the person they were writing to was alive and getting better — and sent the owl off.
He would choose his owl when they went to Diagon Alley before the school year.
He already knew what he was looking for.