Chapter Text
Deep in the forest, past the giant oak tree, at the base of the Big Hill, there is a rushing river that runs to the east.
Sirius Black stands, barefoot on a stone, wet moss seeping between his toes.
He is seven years old--”and a half!” he would be quick to add--with two baby teeth missing right in front. He knows how to write all his letters in cursive, can count to one hundred, and reads books with more chapters than pictures. He loves to play pretend.
Sometimes, when his mother gets cross, he pretends he is a captive--a high priced prisoner with a ransom on his life. He imagines that the tight grip of his mother’s hands about his wrists are shackles, and his locked bedroom door is his cell. He fantasizes about the day his saviors will find him--and maybe they’ll take his brother with too, if he’s nice.
Other times, like today, when his mother’s mood has transcended ‘cross,’ and has edged more into the territory of ‘explosive,’ Sirius will hide out in the woods, and pretend he isn’t Sirius at all.
Today, he is a karate master from Japan.
He knows all about karate. His mentor gave him a book that had photographs of men in impressive fighting stances. Sirius can point out exactly where Japan is on the map. It’s a long way from England, but he imagines he’s there now. He heard Japan has its own sea, so today, the river is playing pretend as well.
He puts his hands together like a prayer, and bows to an invisible foe, impressed by the way he manages not to bend his knees. With trepidation, he angles his feet at a diagonal, shoulder-width distance, placing his body in a shaky balance atop the boulder in the river.
He holds his arms out in front of him, his hands flexed and stiff like boards. He straightens his elbow with a quick motion, slicing his arm through the air in a solid, ‘chop!’
“Hi-ya!” he yells, like he’s seen them do in the films, placing a painful blow across the chest of his made-up enemy.
He snaps back to position, wobbling a little on the slick rock. He steadies himself with a deep breath through his nose. The breeze rustles the trees along the bank, and the fast water rushes noisily like a faucet. As he breathes, he smells the damp grass and mud, and the underlying scent of the trout.
He shifts his weight to his right side, and kicks out into the empty air with his left.
He stumbles; nearly tumbles right off the rock. He throws out his arms to keep his balance, bringing himself back with a tremendous blush. A real karate master, he knows, can kick out his leg and suspend it in the air at waist-level. Sirius is mortified that his weak thigh muscles can hardly kick that high for even a second. He resets his stance with a newfound determination, refusing to be brought back to reality.
Again he leans to the right, sucks in as much air as his lungs will hold, and exhales as he kicks, using every ounce of strength he can muster.
For a beautiful moment, he is in perfect form, his leg outstretched, perpendicular to his body.
He then loses the pose, the inertia from the kick causing him to fall backwards, faster than he can stop it.
Knowing that falling is now inevitable, Sirius braces himself for his unintentional swim. It’s summer, but he knows these waters always run a little cold. His feet slide off the stone, the backs of his ankles banging against it, as he splashes into the raging river.
The shock of the chill radiates through his tiny body, every inch of his skin aching. His elbows bump and scratch on jagged rocks, as river water goes into his mouth and up his nose. He kicks his legs and doggy-paddles his arms, trying to stay above the surface, coughing and sputtering while he tries to take in air. He reaches towards the edge, trying to find something hold onto, but the water is too quick for him. He gets carried downstream, further and further from his karate stone.
Somewhere down the river, Sirius gets a grip on a low hanging branch from one of the looming trees, and he holds onto it for dear life. The water whips around him as he tries pulling himself to dry land. He drags his body through the water, inadvertently running right into an undertow.
The powerful current is stronger than him, and he loses his grasp on the branch, the undertow pulling him once again away from the edge. He tries to kick himself free, but his tired limbs can’t seem to break away. A panic begins welling in his belly, as it gets harder and harder for him to to stay above the surface. He swallows mouthfuls of grimy river water, choking and spitting. Sirius’ chest gets tight, his head dizzy, without enough oxygen, but just as he starts getting really and truly afraid, he feels something grab onto his shirt.
Unable to open his eyes with the river water rushing at his face, Sirius blindly reaches out and feels someone’s hand take his. He holds on tight, and lets himself be tugged out of the rip current, all the way back to the edge. Once there, he wastes no time lifting himself out of the water. He climbs out onto the muddy grass, and takes a moment to catch his breath.
“Are you okay?” comes a voice, and Sirius looks over to his rescuer for the first time.
He’s a boy, about the same age as Sirius, with big, worried, green eyes, and freckles across the bridge of his nose. He shakes his head like a dog coming in from the rain, and droplets fly off his sopping wet curls. His clothes, which are already too big for him, look even more ill-fitting, hanging off his thin limbs and torso with water weight. He has an oval-shaped, multi-colored bruise under his left eye, but Sirius doesn’t think he got it jumping into the river after him--it looks old.
“I think so,” Sirius says hoarsely, sitting up into a cross-legged position and taking stock of his own body. His own clothes are heavy and soaking, too, and his long hair is messy and tangled, and he knows his mother is going to have a fit about it when he gets home. He’s got tiny scratches on his arms, and the backs of his ankles sting. He examines them closer and sees a good chunk of skin has been scraped off both of them, and he lets out a hiss of pain, the wounds suddenly hurting more now that he can see them.
“You hurt your achilles tendons,” says the boy, and Sirius furrows his brow.
“My what?” he asks, trying to ignore the stinging in his eyes as he becomes more and more aware of how much the cuts hurt. He will not cry in front of this stranger, he vows.
“That’s what the back of your ankles are called,” the boy says matter-of-factly, leaning over to see Sirius’ battle scars. “That looks like it smarts,” he adds sympathetically.
“Yeah,” Sirius agrees with a grimace, touching one of his ankles gently. “Ouch.”
The boy regards Sirius for a moment. “Close your eyes,” he says.
“Why?” asks Sirius, frowning.
“I have a way to make it not hurt as much,” says the boy. “Trust me.”
Sirius hesitates. “You’re not going to touch them, are you?” he asks.
“No, I promise--cross my heart,” says the boy, drawing an X in the air above his chest.
Sirius pushes his wet hair behind his ears, watching the boy suspiciously, before acquiescing and shutting his eyes.
“Okay,” says the boy. “Now, in your head, picture a big, purple square.”
Sirius opens an eye. “Why?” he asks skeptically.
“Just trust me,” the boy says. “And keep your eyes closed. You gotta picture it really, really clearly for it to work.”
Sirius presses his lips together in a fine line, feeling doubtful, but closes his eye again, and pictures in his mind a big, purple square.
“You doing it?” asks the boy.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, now turn it into a big, yellow triangle.”
Sirius doesn’t much see the point of this, but he changes the square in his imagination into a big, yellow triangle.
“Did it,” he says.
“Good. Now make it a blue circle.”
Sirius imagines the triangle turning into a blue circle.
“Now give the circle pink polka dots.”
Sirius smiles a little at the absurdity of it, but he puts pink polka dots all over the circle in his head.
“Now make it a brown trapezoid.”
Sirius frowns. “How many sides does a trapezoid have again?” he asks without opening his eyes.
“Um,” says the boy, laughing a little. “I don’t actually remember. Forget that one, just picture the purple square again. Then make it really small--so small you can barely see it.”
“Okay,” says Sirius.
“Now purse your lips and blow and pretend like you’re blowing the square away.”
Sirius giggles a little, and then sets his lips like he’s giving a kiss, and blows. In his head he sees his tiny purple square fly away.
“Now open your eyes slowly,” instructs the boy, and Sirius blinks a couple times, adjusting back to the light, before looking up. “Do your ankles feel better?” the boy asks.
Sirius considers this. They certainly still sting, but nowhere near the amount they did a few minutes ago. He grins. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, they do. How’d you do that?” he asks in awe.
“My mum used to do that for me when I’d get headaches or scrape my knees,” the boy explains. “It gets your mind off of it, so you can’t think about how much it hurts.”
“Neat, thanks,” says Sirius. “And thanks for, you know…” He nods towards the river.
“You looked like you were drowning. I saw you fall in from the rocks over there. What were you doing?”
“Oh,” says Sirius, suddenly embarrassed, sure that his pretend karate battle looked very silly to an observer. “Um, I was trying to do karate.”
“Oh cool,” says the boy. “I’ve never met someone who can do karate.”
“I’m not very good,” says Sirius with a blush. “I mean, I fell in the river.”
“Still,” says the boy. “I mean, it looked cool until that part, anyway.”
Sirius grins. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks,” says Sirius humbly, and the boy nods.
They look away from each other, both at a loss for what to say next. Sirius twists the hem of his shirt, squeezing some of the water out, and the boy absently pulls grass out from the ground.
“Did you know that karate comes from Japan?” the boy then asks, breaking the silence, and Sirius perks up, nodding.
“Mhm!” he says excitedly. “I know where that is on the globe and everything. It’s in Asia,” he adds, just in case this boy doesn’t know.
“Yep,” says the boy. “I know that too. I like learning where places are. I know all sorts of countries. I even know the capitals of some of them. Tokyo is Japan’s.”
“That’s cool,” Sirius says, genuinely impressed. “I want to go to Japan, sometime, but it’s pretty far away. I’d have to fly there, and I think that would cost a lot of money. I’m sure my mum and dad could afford it, but I don’t think they’d let me go.”
“I’ve never been on an airplane before.”
“You haven’t?” says Sirius, incredulous. His family has been making trips to Italy and France every few months for as long as he can remember. “They’re really fun. Kinda scary if you’re afraid of heights, though.”
“I’m not,” the boy assures him.
“Then you’d probably like them.”
The boy nods. Sirius feels sort of funny talking about airplanes and travel, because he gets the distinct impression that this boy doesn’t have very much money.
“I wish I could go on one,” says the boy, somewhat wistfully. “I’d like to travel somewhere new. I don’t even care where. Just anywhere but home.”
“You don’t want to go home?” asks Sirius, and when the boy shakes his head, he asks, “How come? Is your mum mean or something?”
“Oh, I don’t live with my mum,” says the boy. “Or my dad.”
“Why not?”
“Well, my dad left a couple years ago. I don’t know where he went, but it made my mum really sad, and she had to go to a hospital because of it. She told me I couldn’t live with her until the doctors said her head was all better, so I have a foster dad now. He makes me call him Mr. Greyback. He’s the one who’s mean,” the boy says with a scowl.
“That sounds awful,” says Sirius sympathetically. “I sort of know what you mean, though. My dad is alright I guess, but my mum hates me.”
“Why, what does she do?”
“She just gets cross about everything, and then locks me in my room, sometimes for the whole day with no supper.”
“Does she hit you?” the boy asks very frankly, and Sirius is taken aback.
“No,” he says quickly. “Or, well, I mean sometimes she or my mentors will hit my knuckles with rulers if I do something out of line, but that’s all.”
“Hm,” says the boy, shrugging. “Still, that’s no good. Sorry.”
“S’ok.” Sirius picks absently at a small cut on his elbow. “Why’d you ask that, though? Does...does Mr. Greyback hit you?”
The boy averts his gaze a little. “Sometimes,” he says. “More during the summer, when there’s no one around to see the bruises.”
Sirius isn’t sure what to say to that. His mother yells plenty, and he’s had his fair share of nights of going to bed with an empty stomach, but no one has ever really laid hands on him. Thinking of this peculiar boy--who pictures shapes when he’s hurt, and saves strangers from drowning in the river--getting knocked about by someone who’s meant to look after him makes Sirius feel like he does on the rare occasions his mother gets mad at his little brother. He hardly knows this boy, but he has a sudden and intense desire to protect him.
“It’s okay, though,” the boy adds, noticing he’s made Sirius uncomfortable. “I’ll get to be with my mum again soon, I’m sure. Besides,” he adds. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“What doesn’t hurt? Getting hit?”
“Yeah,” says the boy. He points to the fading bruise on his cheek. “He did this, and I didn’t feel it at all.”
“Looks like it hurt,” Sirius says, grimacing at the evidence of the boy’s abuse.
“Yeah, I suspect it would have. Except…” the boy trails off. He looks up at Sirius with a mischievous gleam in his eye. “You wanna know a secret?” he asks.
“Sure,” says Sirius, sitting up a little straighter.
The boy grins. He beckons for Sirius to lean forward. Sirius does, so that their foreheads are almost touching, and the boy whispers, “I know how to do magic.”
Sirius sits back, crossing his arms across his chest. “I thought you were going to tell me a real secret,” he says with a flat tone, and the boy frowns.
“It is a real secret,” he says. “Honest.”
“Magic isn’t real,” says Sirius, suddenly annoyed. Sirius prides himself on his smarts, and if this boy thinks he can trick him with little kid stuff--well, it’s an insult to his intelligence, but the boy doesn’t back down. He shakes his head vehemently, saying,
“I mean it!”
“Prove it,” Sirius says, setting his jaw, thinking he’s caught this stranger in his lie, but the boy grins.
“Fine,” he says. He looks around him and picks up a large leaf off the ground. He holds his hand with his palm up, and sets the leaf very gently on it. “Stay quiet for a second,” he says, staring at the leaf with such concentration that Sirius almost laughs.
He doesn’t, though, humoring this boy and remaining quiet. He sits in silence for nearly a whole minute. The boy doesn’t blink, his eyes fixed on the leaf as though they were stuck there.
“Nothing’s happening,” Sirius says, growing bored,, but the boy quickly shushes him.
“Just a moment, I’ve almost got it,” he says in a strained voice. He inhales very deeply, and as he exhales, the leaf in his hand slowly begins to rise.
For a split second, Sirius mistakes it as the wind, but the leaf levitates in a controlled line, directly up, higher and higher, until it’s hanging in the air above both of their heads.
Sirius gapes up at it, and then back at the boy, who isn’t looking at him, but is smiling smugly. The boy then breaks his eye contact with the leaf, and it drifts back towards the ground, carried a little ways away by the wind.
“How did you do that?” Sirius breathes, staring at the boy with a mixture of admiration and fear.
“I told you,” the boy says, still grinning ear-to-ear. “Magic.”
Sirius falters, at a loss for words. “Are you a wizard?” he finally blurts out, and the boy just laughs.
“No,” he says. “Magic doesn’t work like that. There aren’t magic people and non-magic people. Everyone can do it. It’s just that most people don’t know how.”
“How do you know how, then?” asks Sirius, unable to keep the awe out of his voice.
“My mum,” the boy says simply. “She taught me about it, a long time ago, when I was going to get sent away. She told me it was to help keep me safe.” The boy looks out to the river and sighs. “My mum explained it to me that everything in the whole universe is made out of the same stuff, and so if you concentrate really hard, you can see how everything’s connected.”
“What do you mean?”
The boy squints like he’s thinking about how to explain it to Sirius. “I told you it doesn’t hurt when I get hit, right?” he says, turning back to face him. Sirius nods. “That’s because, if I concentrate really hard, I can see how Mr. Greyback’s hands and my body are really just the same thing. So when he hits me, it’s just like he’s hitting empty air. I don’t feel anything.
“It works with other things too. Like, I can touch fire, or breathe underwater if I want--that would have been handy for you,” he adds with a smirk. “Making things float like that is really hard, though, I can only do that sometimes. And it all takes a lot of practice. You can’t think about much of anything else, or else it doesn’t work.”
“So anyone can do it?” Sirius asks.
“Yeah, but most people don’t believe that they can, so they never try. My mum said that the older you get, the harder it is to learn how to do it.”
“So...so could I do it?” Sirius asks, and the boy smiles kindly at him.
“Anyone can,” he reiterates. “But it’s not easy. You have to focus more than you’ve ever focused on anything before. I wasn’t able to do it until this one day when Mr. Greyback got really upset, and was trying to hurt me more than usual. I was trying to think about something other than him hitting me, so I focused on everything being connected like my mum used to say, and eventually, I stopped feeling any pain.”
“Can you teach--” Sirius starts, but at that moment a woman’s voice cuts through the woods.
“Sirius Black!” it says, and Sirius groans, recognizing it instantly. He turns to see his cousin, Bellatrix, trampling through the trees, hands on her hips, looking cross.
“Bella,” he says. “I’m sorry. I was about to come home, I swear.” His lie falls to deaf ears. Bellatrix walks right up to him, pinches his ear, and pulls him to his feet.
“Look at your clothes,” she says. “You went swimming in your day clothes?”
“No!” Sirius says, screwing up his face as Bellatrix pinches harder. “I fell into the river. It was an accident.”
“And where are your shoes?” she asks, ignoring his explanation. She glances over and sees the boy, who has also scurried to his feet, warily watching Bellatrix. “And who’s this?” she asks, glaring at the boy.
“Um,” Sirius says, realizing he doesn’t know the boy’s name. “He’s the one who pulled me out of the river.”
“I recognize you,” Bellatrix says. “You’re one of those system kids who lives in the village on the other side of the forest.” The boy says nothing. “Go on, now,” Bellatrix adds rudely. “We don’t mix with your kind. Sirius here should have known better than to talk to filth like you.”
“Bella!” Sirius exclaims. “He’s not filth, he’s my friend! I told you, he saved me from the river.”
“If you had stayed home and just received your punishment from Auntie like you were supposed to, you wouldn’t have been in the river in the first place,” spits Bellatrix. “Now come home. I told your mother I’d fetch you.”
Sirius looks apologetically towards the boy, who just smiles sadly at him.
“Remember what I said,” says the boy softly, as Bellatrix starts pulling Sirius away. “You just have to concentrate really hard. Anyone can do it.” He then turns on his heel and starts to run, disappearing through the trees.
Sirius stares at the spot the boy had been, until Bellatrix tugs him so hard he’s afraid his arm is going to pop out of its socket, and he finally trails behind her, letting her lead him back to Grimmauld Place, where he knows his mother is waiting with a ruler and his bedroom key.
That night, with an empty stomach, lying on his bed, staring up at his ceiling, he thinks of the strange boy he met in the woods, and his supposed magic. Sirius closes his eyes and tries to concentrate, seeing if he can feel everything being connected, like the boy insisted they were, but he doesn’t feel any different.
He sits up, back against his headboard, and grabs a pencil off his bedside table, and holds it in the palm. He stares at it, like the boy did to the leaf, and clears his mind the best he can.
‘I’m going to make this pencil float,’ he thinks to himself over and over again, but after several long minutes all he’s got is a headache, the pencil still static in his hand. He tosses it onto the floor in frustration, and buries his head in his pillow.
The next day, he sneaks away again into the woods, searching for the magic boy, to ask him to teach him what he’s supposed to do to be able to make things move with his mind. He looks through the woods until sundown, but he doesn’t see the boy, nor any trace that he’d been there.
Sirius goes back to the woods each day for the rest of the summer, but he never finds the boy again. By the time he goes back to school in the fall, he’s starting to believe that it was all just in his imagination.
‘There’s no such thing as magic,’ he tries to tell himself, but even as he thinks it, he knows it isn’t true. He saw the boy do magic, he knows he did, whether he sees him again or not.
And if that boy can do magic, Sirius figures--spending his school days trying to concentrate, not on his lessons, but on everything being connected--then so can he.