1991, Hogwarts Castle
3rd Person POV
The hallways of Hogwarts were quiet at this hour. They were always quiet in the evenings. In the long hallways of Hogwarts, portraits dozed in their frames. Torches burned low and steady.
The silence was, however, broken by the sudden arrival of hurried footsteps.
Minerva McGonagall, the Deputy Headmistress and Head of House Gryffindor, had an oddly serious expression, the lines of her face drawn inward as she moved through the corridor with urgency, alongside controlled alarm and a grief she hadn't yet given herself time to process.
She reached the stone gargoyle at the base of the Headmaster's tower without slowing.
"Ginger newt."
The gargoyle stepped aside without ceremony. The circular staircase beyond rose steadily, and Minerva stepped onto it without breaking stride, disappearing upward as the stone guardian moved back into place behind her.
The door to the Headmaster's office pushed open as she stepped in. The office was warm with firelight. Fawkes trilled softly on a small dogwood branch. On the wall hung the portraits of previous headmasters — some sleeping, some awake, some talking quietly amongst themselves. Shelves filled with books and instruments of unknown purpose lined the walls. And in the middle, behind the great desk, sat Albus Dumbledore, writing, his quill flowing steadily across a long roll of parchment, while his other hand was buried inside a jar of what appeared to be clusters of cockroaches.
He took out a few, looked up with a smile, and said, "Good evening, Professor. Would you like som—"
He stopped, his hand braking mid-air, as he saw the grim expression on her face.
The cockroaches were set aside and the quill put down.
"Minerva," he said. "Is there a problem?"
She did not answer immediately, but instead reached into her robes and placed a letter on the desk in front of him, sliding it across the surface carefully.
"Dumbledore, has the Quill of Acceptance ever made a mistake?"
"No, such a thing has never happened. Both the quill and the book have not made a mistake once since the time of the Founders," said Dumbledore, as he picked up the letter.
He looked at it and was already reading the address on the front before he'd consciously decided to do so, and then he stopped. He brought the letter closer and re-read the address, hoping his eyes had deceived him.
They hadn't.
The furrow that crossed his brow was not the usual kind.
"Have you checked the book and the quill?" asked Dumbledore, hoping she hadn't and that it was a mistake. But as he looked up, her affirmative gaze sent a chill through his heart.
"We need to save that child, Dumbledore. We hav—" She stopped speaking because he was already standing.
There was no theatre in it. No dramatic sweep of robes or declaration of intent. Albus Dumbledore, the greatest white wizard of the century, simply rose from his chair with the quiet decisiveness of a man who had already determined that each second spent in this room was a second wasted.
"Calm down, Minerva," he said, his tone firm and steady, reassuring. "I am going to the Ministry. That child will be saved."
Fawkes moved toward him, and a moment later they were gone in a flash of fire.
Minerva stood alone in the office.
After a long moment, she looked down at the letter and read the address one more time.
Azkaban.
The North Sea, Azkaban Prison
3rd Person POV
There were no sunsets visible from the cells.
That was one of the cruelties of the place — not the worst one, but one that accumulated. In the cells there was grey light, cold air, and nothing else. No colour. No warmth. No hope. Nothing that might remind you that a world existed outside these walls, that there was life out there.
In one of those dark, damp cells, a thin boy sat against a wall.
He was visibly thin, in a way that spoke of years of inadequate meals, inadequate sunlight, and a body that prioritised survival over health. His height was clearly shorter than children his age, his hair dark, long and messy, his clothes tattered. His eyes didn't have the shine of a child. They were alert and old in a way that had nothing to do with age.
He looked at a small grey stone on the floor of his cell. He looked at it for a long time. Then he pointed at it, focused, murmured, and tried. Nothing happened. He tried again and the result remained unchanged.
He took a breath, settled something inside himself, and tried again.
This time something happened. The stone twitched as it sprouted limbs and a head rose from its surface. It turned into a small stone dog.
The boy looked at it for a moment, then turned away. There was no joy on his face.
Alex POV
'Four years. Four. Fucking. Years. I have been rotting in this damned place with flying black robes with fucking black holes for heads and crazy prisoners screaming hell all the time. Can't even sleep properly — these fucking animals throw stones at you, or worse, the few who can do wandless magic sometimes by luck try to send curses your way.
If I hadn't been counting the days all this time, I too probably would have lost myself and even the will to live. Those disgusting dementors keep dragging up bad memories. I haven't had a good meal in years.
Four years of listening to screams and cries. New prisoners keep coming — they scream all the time at first, then they stop. They stop living completely and become no different from living corpses.'
I sighed, moved toward the bars of my cell, and looked at the cell opposite mine, pressing my face to the bars.
That cell was dark, as usual. But if you looked carefully, you would catch the faint image of a man — long-limbed, hollow-cheeked, the Azkaban kind of thin. He was lying on the floor but not sleeping. He never had fixed hours.
"Sirius," I called, quietly enough that others wouldn't hear. "Sirius, wake up. I know you're not sleeping. Wake up, wake up…"
With a rough grunt, he sat up and turned his face toward me. "Ugh. What is it now, Alex?"
It wasn't really a question. It was the tone of a man running low on patience, having had it depleted for years with no sign of that stopping.
'Why is he so rude all the time?! Hmm… must be because he feels lonely. I should send the dog to him at night!'
"Teach me something new. I'm bored," I said.
"Ugh, again?! Have you even learned the Reductor Curse yet?"
"Obviously. Watch this." I moved away from the bars and tried to cast the curse on the wall.
It failed.
I cast it again. This time it worked — a little too well. The wall shuddered but stood unharmed, dust drifting from the point of impact.
The problem was the sound. From down the corridor came that familiar sensation — creeping cold, the slow erasure of warmth from the air. Then the dementors drifted in, drawn by the noise; horrible, boneless things, creatures of nightmares.
Sirius and I dropped simultaneously, both of us flat on our cell floors, breathing shallow, unmoving.
'The trick was not thinking happy thoughts. That was a child's understanding of it. The trick was to think of nothing — to present yourself as mentally grey and still as stone.
I got good at this in my second year here.'
We lay still for a long time, like two stones. Then, finally, the chill receded and the corridor fell quiet again.
I opened my eyes a fraction to confirm there were no more flying black robes before sitting back up.
"Sirius."
I heard him muttering something as he sat up.
"You know I'm turning eleven soon," I said.
"You've mentioned it."
"Any day now the Hogwarts letter should arrive." I paused for dramatic effect. "I'll be leaving."
Silence from across the corridor. A different kind of silence than before.
"And here's the thing," I continued, keeping my voice completely serious. "Once I'm out of here, I'll be in a position to actually do things. Useful things. Things that could potentially help a certain wrongfully imprisoned man in a cell across from mine."
"Alex—"
"I know. So what I'm proposing," I said dramatically, "is simple. You begin addressing me with appropriate respect, formally acknowledge me as your master, and in return, I send you cookies once a month." I paused and continued in a tempting voice. "Good cookies. Not the cheap kind or the shop-bought ones, but good ones. Tasty ones."
Another long silence.
"You want me to become your subordinate," said Sirius, in a tone that suggested he was checking whether he had heard correctly.
"I want you to call me master," I confirmed.
"For cookies."
"For tasty cookies. Think — do you even remember the last time you had anything that was not just edible, but actually tasty?"
"You're ten years old, and you want me — a fully trained adult wizard from one of the oldest wizarding families in Britain — to call you master. For cookies."
"Yes."
The silence this time lasted long enough that I started to wonder if he'd genuinely decided to go to sleep. Then I heard something from across the corridor that took me a moment to identify.
Sirius Black was laughing. Not because he was happy, but at the sheer absurdity of the situation — the heir to the most prestigious pureblood family in Britain, being offered the position of a child's subordinate, in exchange for cookies, inside a prison.
"Cookies," he said finally, his voice still unsteady. "Per month. And I'm not calling you master."
"Boss."
"Absolutely not."
"Sir."
"…I'll consider it."
'Victory.'
Sirius POV
The laughter faded and the quiet came back. I leaned back against the wall and looked at the boy across the corridor.
'How long has it been.
Long enough that I genuinely cannot answer, with any confidence, the question of whether I am currently sane.
And this boy has been here for four of those years.
I've seen him on the bad days — when he doesn't come to the bars, when the cell is silent and I can hear, sometimes, something quiet and wretched from across the corridor. I've always chosen, carefully, not to acknowledge it, because some shreds of dignity matter more when everything else has been taken. I've seen him exhausted and barely moving.
And I have seen him get up and ask me to teach him the next spell.
Most adult wizards placed in these conditions, without a wand, would lose the capacity for magic entirely within the first year.
This boy is teaching himself wandless magic. He's learning Occlumency. In Azkaban. At ten years old. Using whatever I can give him — a barely functioning, half-broken foundation — and building himself up in conditions specifically engineered to demolish everyone.'
I closed my eyes and drifted toward sleep, unknowing that somewhere far away, an owl was already fighting against the wind, carrying a letter that would soon change the fate of the boy — and with him, the entire wizarding world.