minnow // sirius black

twenty-seven

One of the Death Eaters, either suicidal or insanely idiotic ran at the bubble.

"Stop!" I shouted as I dropped the shield, but it was too late. He crashed into the bubble and disintegrated.

I couldn't move. I couldn't feel anything, nor could I breathe. The last Death Eater sent a curse at us before he apparated, and I blocked it without even meaning to.

I stared at the pile of dust that one Death Eater now was as eyes started watering. Dean grabbed me around the shoulders, pulling my back against his chest, as he apparated us back to the house. I collapsed onto the floor as Dad wrapped his arms around me.

I knew it would happen, eventually, but I never expected it to be in that way. I couldn't get the image of pain out of my head.

"Do you think he was under the Imperious curse?"

"Most definitely," Dean responded to Mum. "Nobody is stupid enough to run into that. Someone didn't want the Ministry to get their hands on him."

It didn't ease the guilt.

I was stunned when I immediately got another vision, going limp in Dad's arms and twitching slightly.

The vision was of a house nearby, Marina's.

We got there right after the Death Eaters did, and we managed to get Marina out of the house before they found her.

We didn't notice that one of the two had started following us until we were a block from our home, so Dad took several wrong turns before he grumbled about not wanting to apparate, but he told us to apparate out of the car, back to Marina's house and then back to our house. He told Marina, Dean and I not to linger at her house for long before we apparated home.

So we did, and the Death Eaters simply continued to follow Dad until he managed to pull over and apparate home before they could reach the car. The Death Eaters went from house to house looking for us, but they were in the wrong area.

After that, Dumbledore agreed that I needed to go elsewhere, that more extreme measures needed to be taken in order to ensure my protection.

He set up a safe house, of sorts, near to a Wizarding community in the West Country of England. The home was a small cottage. It was technically three stories, with the living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom on the ground floor while there was a large loft bedroom with a bathroom on the second floor, and a huge basement.

While Dumbledore had set the safe house part of it up, it was my home. Once I turned 18, I was given the key to an entire Vault at Gringott's that my parents had set up when I was a toddler. James had one of his own, and for the first time in our lives, we were separated.

My first purchase was the cottage, and I gave Dumbledore full reigns to turn it into a house that would keep me safe.

Within a week of buying it, he was finished. He had asked for a Secret Keeper, for the Fidelius charm, and I chose Sirius. Dumbledore had Sirius Floo-ed to the cottage, where I gave him a tiny tour of my home, grinning the whole time. When I told him why he was there, he immediately tried to talk me into using Remus as the Secret Keeper, but I refused to budge. I wanted it to be Sirius because he was my soulmate, he wouldn't rat me out even if he wanted to.

The first night in the cottage was strange. I had to go to the store and buy food, order furniture, and buy towels and sheets and all the things I hadn't expected to need to do for at least another year. Dean had come with me, and I let him choose his own bedding.

I slept in the larger bedroom on the ground floor while he slept in the loft on the top floor.

The morning was awful, as the beds were terrible. We sat down at the rickity table in the kitchen to talk about furniture. I forced Dean to have an opinion on his bed, as he was now a permanent fixture in my life.