Patron Saint of Falling Over Things

Sirius walked down the hidden path to Pickering Lower, ostensibly to send an owl to the Ministry, but also to have some time to talk with the Doctor.

"Are you nae worried about the werewolf, being out at night?" the Doctor asked. He was barely visible in the long grass by the verge, but for the blue glow of the tip of his tail.

"I've faced werewolves before. I know how to be careful," said Sirius. He indicated his wand, out and ready if needed. "Doctor, things are not good for werewolves in this time – they're not all that positive even in my time. There's a lot of bad ideas – that they're evil, that they can't be helped, that they shouldn't be allowed in wizarding communities. I'm worried for Willoughby. I'm worried for whoever bit him in the first place."

"That’s very idealistic, you know. I would tend tae think the one who bit him knew exactly what he was doing," said the Doctor. "I'd warn against getting too invested in this beastie. In my experience, anyway."

Sirius frowned at the little dog. "How extensive is your experience, exactly?" He hadn't expected to encounter this kind of absolute thinking, not from the Doctor, who seemed to be able to find a positive thought for anything, from slime mould to planet-eating robots.

The Doctor trotted on, cutting a vee through the long grass. "I was nearly eaten. It's definitely one way to get to know a creature, being eaten by it."

Sirius thought of Remus, not the Remus people saw, the slightly shabby bookish man who needed a good meal or three, but the Remus whose focused, ardent gaze made the hair at Sirius' nape prickle and his stomach lurch. "That's not the only way to know a werewolf, Doctor," he said.

The Doctor stopped short, and the grass shifted around him. "Really?" he said, amazed.

Sirius nodded. In the dark and the quiet, with only the faint blue lit, he felt an intense sadness for the creature prowling the night alone. It would be dawn soon. It would wake up somewhere, along and in pain and probably confused.

"They're people," he said, finally. "They hate and love and forgive the same as we do. They deserve the same chance to do good in the world that we do. Not that we're all given that chance," he added.

They walked on in silence as the darkness thinned, and Sirius tried not to think about the way dawn came in on the island, how Azkaban made you think, every time, that morning would bring some hope, and instead delivered rattling breath and draped misery.

"Do you want to talk about it?" asked the Doctor.

He looked down at the black dog by his ankles. "Talk about what?"

"This prison of yours." The Doctor jumped down onto the path, and pushed his wet nose into Sirius' palm.

Sirius kept walking, a determined pace. "It leaves a mark on you," he said, finally. "It never feels very far away. Even when I'm travelling with you, I feel that Azkaban is waiting for me." I hauled myself out, he reminded himself. For Harry, for James and Lily, for Remus I climbed out of that place. I can stand to talk about it, here, with my friend.

"Will they send the werewolf there?" asked the Doctor. They'd come to the village square, but only Allaun Tittler remained, hanging tools about his belt, ready to go into the forest as soon as it was fully light.

"Possibly," said Sirius. "It's already attacked someone. But really, it depends on the mood of the Ministry at any given moment – that, and whether they can sweep it under the rug easily or not."

"Morning," said Allaun. "Any luck with your search last night? We packed it in at three in the morning. Didn't see a thing, which is good in a way." He picked up a large pickling jar full of tiny insects swarming all over each other.

"No, no luck at all, I'm afraid," said Sirius. "Woodlice?" he asked, pointing at the jar.

Allaun nodded. "Going to try and settle the bowtruckles down, if I can. I'm worried they're going to be next to decamp, and then we'll probably lose the biggest trees.

Sirius watched him wrap the jar carefully in a rag and tuck it into a knapsack. His belt, hung with tree hook, knife and a coil of rope, also bore a woodcutter's charm wound around it, a thin twist of vines of different plants, still green, cut in the last two days. It had been a long time since Sirius' last herbology class, but a man with a werewolf for a lover knew wolfsbane when he saw it. There was mistletoe, too, an older repellent against lycanthropy.

"You know," said Sirius. "You know what's out there – do you know who it is? Have you been protecting them all along? Because if that Muggle man is still breathing in a month's time, there's going to be more trouble than any obliviation can cover up."

Allaun loosened the knife in the scabbard on his belt. "We've been nothing but polite, mate, but when it comes to it, you're not one of us. We take care of our own, all right?"

Sirius put out his hands, placating. "I understand. I said I didn't want to cause trouble. I just don't want anyone else to be hurt."

"None of my business, what goes on in Muggle territory," Allaun said, his mouth grim. "Bad enough we have to skulk behind illusions and cantrips. Let them look after their own people, just as we do." He swung his knapsack over his shoulder and headed into the forest.

"That didnae go well," said the Doctor. "I wonder how long he's known."

"And why it's something that's suddenly out of control," said Sirius. "I think I'll send off that owl now." If Sirius' younger self could see him now, he'd be appalled: voluntarily reporting to the Ministry. Perhaps he'd finally become responsible? At least with the Ministry involved, Willoughby would be able to get some care.

The Postmistress was Mrs Vim, and she wore a traditional pointed hat and a pink quilted dressing gown as she sorted the morning's mail and fed the row of sleepy owls that had delivered it. A sleeping toddler in orange striped pajamas clung to her hip as she worked, but did not wake, not even when a screech owl landed with a large parcel wrapped in brown paper.

Mrs Vim gave Sirius a quill and parchment, and he scrawled a note warning the Ministry of a possible werewolf attack in the Muggle village of Pickering. He did not sign the note, but rolled it up, sealed it, and passed it to Mrs Vim who summoned a large barn owl with a click of her fingers.

"Charged to whom, dearie?" she asked, her own quill in hand to note it down.

"Black Family, Grimmauld Place," he said, without thinking. Then again, honestly, who'd notice an extra postage charge? They'd probably put it down to his Great Uncle Arcturus, who was given to random wandering in the countryside. As he left the Post Office, he did the mental calculations, and realise that Arcturus was dead by now. Oh, well. They did always say he was eccentric.

In the village square, the Doctor stood four-square with his ears cocked. "Do you hear that?" he said. His tail wasn't very visible in the growing daylight, as long as he stood away from the shadows.

Sirius tilted his head in a similar posture, though he couldn't hear anything but the noise of the forest, and the sounds of people beginning to move about the village. The sun peeped over the rooftops now, and the birdsong was riotous. He shook his head. In human form, he couldn't pick up whatever the Doctor was hearing. He bent down to scratch the Doctor's head. "What do you hear, then? Tell me about it."

"It sounds like a high-coherence optical amplifier," said the Doctor with difficulty. These were words no Scottie dog was every supposed to say. He coughed afterwards, his tongue poking out.

"Is your dog all right?" asked Alice Featherfort, walking past on the way to the forest for her morning flight. "You should ask Allaun about it – he makes a nice anti-hairball potion, lots of creosote in it. Fixed my cat right up after one dose."

"I just bet it did," the Doctor said.

Sirius patted the Doctor briskly along his sides as if strumming the cough out of him. "Thank you, I will."

"You will nae," said the Doctor. "I will bite you somewhere verrry tender."

Alice shook herself into the form of a huge magpie, and spread her white-tipped wings. She soared off over the rooftops and towards the trees of the forest.

"Which way was the noise?" said Sirius. "Show me. And on the way, please explain what a high-coherence thingy is, so I'll recognise it when I see it."

The sound came from deep in the forest. "It's a way of amplifying light," said the Doctor, as they walked through the village and down the muddy path. "It was what I used on the Lupine Wavelength Haemovariform in 1879. Turned the moon into a laser, amplified it, made it a weapon."

"And someone's using it now?" asked Sirius. The path they were following was starting to open out into a clearing. Half in shadow, half in early light, a ramshackle cottage leaned against a spreading ash tree.

"Not unless someone's got hold of the Koh-i-nor, they aren't." The Doctor paused on the path, nostrils flaring, ears pricked forward. "Hold up - it smells like someone's burning lemons in there."

Sirius moved before the vomere jinx exploded outwards. He scooped the Doctor up with a hand under his belly and leapt behind the trunk of a tree. The sickly yellow lights flew out of the open door, and zinged through the space where they were standing a moment ago.

"Wait, wait, was that a spell? Is someone shooting spells at us?" The Doctor wriggled in excitement. Sirius tucked him in hard against his side, and drew his own wand. It was awkward, casting with an angry Scottie dog on his hip, but Protego rolled from his wand easily, and the spells bounced off harmless into the treetops.

"Are we in a battle?" shouted the Doctor. "Is it a magical battle?" He barked with excitement, his body thrashing against Sirius', and his legs paddling in the air.

"If it's a battle, it's a fairly poor effort." Sirius advanced on the house, his wand extended forward. "I don't want to hurt you," he shouted to the people in the house. "I want to help!"

A figure moved in front of one of the windows, and a woman's voice called out. "Go away! We just want to be left alone!" A paroxysm of curses and jinxes zoomed from the open door: leg-lockers and stingers and knockbacks, a barrage of schoolyard spells. Sirius batted them aside or simply evaded them as he walked towards the house. Piles of timber and rubbish cluttered the path towards the house, providing plenty of cover, though when he ducked behind a heap of criss-crossed pine branches a writhing mass of wood-beetles burst from the leaf mulch and ran over his shoes. The Doctor stopped wriggling about immediately and tucked his feet up under him. Sirius couldn't blame him; beetles felt terrible in fur. He took a peek from behind the woodpile, to see what the Gribbocks were doing.

A line of washing left out overnight dripped wet with the dew, and the house seemed to be dripping, too, with hanging shutters, loose roof tiles and windows jammed half open. This was an unhappy place. Mr Gribbock eyed him from behind the front door; his face was gaunt and his hair greying. "You fuck off, you Ministry fucker. Had enough of your sort. Fuck off, or I'll send you home spitting slugs, you see if I don't."

Sirius put his hand out, holding his wand loosely, and stepped out from behind the pile of rotting logs. "I don't want trouble," he said. "I know your son's in trouble, and I want to help him."

"You'll fucking shut up about my son," said Mr Gribbock, from behind the half-open door. "My boy's my problem. He served his time, and he's not your piece of meat no more. You can go to the Minister and tell him to shove his own wand up his arse, if he can find either."

Sirius by now had a foot on the doorstep. "I'm not from the Ministry. I want to help your son, Mr Gribbock. A Muggle man was badly hurt last night. He's in a Muggle hospital right now – do you understand me?" Under his arm, the Doctor was threshing, trying to get to the ground. Sirius hitched him up higher, but his little body was slowly slipping down.

Mr Gribbock lifted his wand – hand hewn wood, poorly shaped; no wonder all he could raise were schoolboy hexes – and sighted down it, with the twisted end pointing directly in Sirius' face. "I don't give a fuck about no Muggle bastard. I'm taking care of my family. So take your dog and fuck off home to London."

The Doctor slithered to the ground finally, and shot between Gribbock's legs. Sirius could see the blue light of his tail in the darkened hallway. "Doctor!" he said.

Gribbock was distracted enough by the intrusion not to shoot Sirius' face full of vomiting curses. He swung away to see where the dog had gone, and Sirius could see past him into the house. Inside, Sirius saw a woman, stooped down to catch the creature that had invaded her home. The Doctor stood with his front paws on her knee, and she ruffled his whiskery chin while he made small huffing noises.

"It's all right," said the Doctor. "I know you're afraid, but my friend here can help you. He's really very good at this magic thing, and he's a good man. Will you let him help you? I want your son to be safe in his own home, just the same as you."

The woman couldn't understand the words, of course, but the sentiment of was very clear. She looked up at Sirius, halfway in the house by now, and a sob escaped her tightly pressed lips.

"Can you help my son?" said Mrs Gribbock, panic and desperation seeping out of her.

Sirius tucked his wand into his belt. "I'm going to try," he said. "Tell me about Fen."

Mrs Gribbock swallowed, and avoided the gaze of her husband. "You'll want to come out the back," she said, and gestured with one hand down the narrow corridor. The Doctor sneezed once, and trotted towards the backdoor, and Mrs Gribbock opened the door for him.

Waling through the house, Sirius felt some of the dread lift from his shoulders. The Gribbocks were obviously poor, and the house in ill-repair, but there were signs of a happy life here: brightly painted bookshelves and a fat crocheted tea-cosy with a competent heating charm on it. The mantelpiece leaned, but it bore a black and white photo, clipped from a newspaper, showing young Fen with a small trophy held proudly. Fen was small and sandy-haired, and his buck-toothed figure was perfectly still in the print.

"Cricket," said Mr Gribbock, his voice hoarse. "It's a Muggle sport; Fen had a passion for it. He used to run away to the Muggles to play." He nodded towards the photograph. "That were in the Muggle newspaper, we were terrified about what might come of it. But nobody said nothing. Allaun said if we keep our head down, there'd be no problem, and he were right, up to the end of it."

"What happened? At the end of it?" Sirius asked. He'd grown up in a time where mixing with Muggles was merely frowned upon, but it had been, in the past, more than just an uncouth act, it had been criminal.

Mr Gribbock shook his head, perplexed. "I don't understand the whole of it, myself. Fen, he came home from a game with one of the Muggles, an older man. He wanted to take Fen to the police – the Muggle police! – he said someone had been giving him trouble, and it had to stop." He was angry now, his face flushed. "Like I don't know my own son. Like I need a Muggle telling me how to keep my family safe."

Sirius winced. "And then?"

"Well, the Ministry might look the other way for a bit of cricket," said Mr Gribbock. "But bringing a Muggle though the Masking Spell we've got on the village, well. The Aurors broke a window to drag Fen out of the house in the middle of the night. And that was that; weren't much of a trial, and we never saw him again, not till his sentence was up."

He led Sirius to a small shack close to the edge of the forest, a woodshed. "We emptied it, see," he said, pointing at the piles of firewood heaped about the clearing.

The woodshed leaned to one side, and the place where the tin met the earth was cleanly exposed, as if someone had given it a good shove from the inside in an attempt to tip it.

"You know what he is," said Sirius. "Was he that way before…" It was still hard to say the word.

"No, he came back from prison with it," said Mr Gribbock. "That and more." He seemed to sag himself, much like his house, now that the defiance had fled him. "He weren't my boy, not anymore."

"Allaun helped us build this up strong," said his wife, showing Sirius the tin walls reinforced with planks and the ceiling hung with wolfsbane. "He's always been fond of Fen, even before he went away. And when we first had him home, before we even knew what… what he was, Allaun took him out in the forest, said the fresh air would help him."

Sirius turned around in the tiny shed. The walls were dented and buckled where Fen had flung himself bodily against the tin, trying to escape. He wondered how much of that urge was the werewolf driving him, and how much was the sheer panic of being enclosed in a small place. For a long time after he escaped, Sirius had slept out of doors, unable to think straight with a roof above him or walls surrounding him.

"What happened last night?" he asked. He watched the Doctor nosing the place where the tin had split like a cocoon. Something there made his ears flatten and his hackles rise.

Mr Gribbock shook his head. "Dunno, dunno – I reckon he was getting angrier and angrier each time he…"

"Transformed," said Sirius. "There's no need to be afraid to say it, not here."

"He were angry enough, the first time – we had no idea, see, and he tore the shutters off his window, went mad in the forest. Then, in here, he could change safely, like, but he hurt himself instead – clawing and biting," Mr Gribbock shook his head. "He was so angry – I thought, when I first saw him, Azkaban's drained the life out him. You'd think I'd be happy to see him full of energy, my boy, but no, not this way."

The Doctor crouched low to the ground now, hackles up in a ridge down his spine and his lips pulled back to show fierce teeth through his whiskers. "Psychovore," he said, in a low growl. "Some kind of psychic vampire's been all over this place."

"I don't understand," said Sirius. "Vampires drink blood, and anyway, I very much doubt a vampire could take on a werewolf, especially one as angry as Fen."

The Gribbocks looked at him, startled, but they were reasonably accepting of a familiar with whom you can have a conversation.

"Nae a vampire," said the Doctor. "Psychic vampire, totally different. This is something very ugly, Sirius. This is unnatural. Here, let me find the right resonance, and I'll show you." He twitched his tail, and it lit up blue, then he thwacked it against the side of the shed, so that the colour grew brighter and the sonic hum higher pitched.

The small shed filled with a rising hum that made Sirius' teeth ache, but the blue light crept along the dented tin until all the walls were illuminated. Within the blue, Sirius saw dark lines stretching along the walls and ceiling. The colour intensified, and the shadowy lines became clearer: arms reaching out to grasp, with long, pointed fingers at the very ends that could snag and snatch.

"Fingerprints," said the Doctor. "Psychic fingerprints."

Sirius turned in a circle, looking at the marks. "Dementor," he said. Out in the forest, far away, something howled as if in deep misery, and Sirius shuddered. "It's waiting," he said. "It knows what he is, it's here to claim him back." He wanted to be sick, at the helplessness of Fen's condition, at the idea that Dementors were near. A terrible realisation hit him: would the thing know? Would it smell some trace of Azkaban on him, and swoop down, wrap around him… He reached down to push his fingers into the Doctor's wiry coat, and breath in the doggish warmth of him. "We have to help him," he said, softly.

The Doctor nosed at his hand. "Of course we do, my friend.


Chapter Three // Chapter Five