1 Rebirth

"Avada Kedavra!"

Those were the last two words he had heard. He'd laughed: really, Bella? You'd use that spell on me? But even before he could speak, even before he could dodge - there was, of course, no blocking the Killing Curse, except by using someone or something else as a shield - the sickly green beam of light that was the visible path of the spell had collided with his chest, and the brute force which Bellatrix Black had imbued her spell with slammed into him, forcing him to take a step back even as he died.

... He'd died, hadn't he?

Sirius Black blinked. There was something like a dusty ceiling in front of his eyes. He realized he was lying down, and half a moment later, that he was on what seemed to be a rough cot, and what seemed to be a dusty ceiling was in fact a dusty ceiling. His family hadn't been religious but he'd been around enough religious people to have formed some idea of Heaven, and well - if this was Heaven, somebody made some seriously misleading advertisements.

So he was alive, he supposed. How? He'd been struck by Bella's Killing Curse, he knew, and he didn't think that there had been anyone in his past that had died for his sake. He didn't have any Dark artifacts that would tie him to the mortal realm, either. He cudgeled his brain, but in the end all he could think of was that he'd been fighting near the Veil in the center of the Department of Mysteries and maybe he'd fallen in and something mysterious had happened. Nothing Sirius, just mysterious. He winced at his horrible humor and decided he was probably more or less alright if he was still able to make bad puns like that.

He decided it was time to check himself out. The Killing Curse left no outward traces, but there was no telling what might've happened while he was dead to the world. Hehe... no wait, he told himself firmly, stop punning. Be Sirius.

He grimaced again and struggled to get up. The thin blanket that had previously been obscuring his view of himself fell away to pool at his waist. Sirius found that he was wearing some sort of rough robe in the sort of greyish-beige color he thought his favorite cousin Andromeda might call either "isabella" or "taupe", and his not-so-favorite cousin Narcissa "dirty". The right side of the robe fastened over the left, forming a V, and there were wide, cylindrical sleeves. The thing fell to just past his hips and was belted closed with a narrow strip of cloth that tied at the waist. Underneath, he seemed to be wearing pants made of the same rough-woven material, with wide, straight legs that cut off around the middle of his calf. The outfit reminded him somewhat of a bathrobe, but that felt wrong; frowning, he pondered some more until he remembered seeing similar sorts of outfit in the "kung fu movies" that his best friend James Potter had introduced him to, so many years before, when James had been newly-married and happily discovering different aspects of his Muggleborn wife's foreign culture (not that Lily had been fond of kung fu movies, Sirius remembered; but James had found them wicked fun).

He hastily fumbled the belt open and verified that he had no injuries. A quick sweep over his legs told him much the same thing. His face felt fine, but he needed a mirror to really check. Looking around, he frowned deeper as he took in the tiny room - the cell, really. Its four walls were hardly three strides apart and the furnishings consisted only of the narrow cot he'd been lying on, a small wooden chest at the foot of the cot, and - ah!

Sirius stood up and went to the wall, where an oblong mirror just the size of a man's face was set. He peered into it---

"What the fuck?" he thought.

Instead of the face he'd been expecting, a young, vaguely Asian face was staring back at him. It had high cheekbones, a narrow and almost gentle jawline with not a trace of hair, small nose, bow-shaped lips that were plumper at the bottom than at the top, and almond-shaped eyes. The eyes' color was the only thing he could recognize - they were still his familiar grey. All in all he figured it wasn't a bad-looking face, though it was more of pretty rather than handsome; the problem was that it was not his face.

"What happened to me?" he mumbled.

Hearing himself speak gave him another shock: his voice remained the same, but he was almost certainly not speaking English. Which was odd, because he didn't know any language other than English, if you didn't count French swear-words. Shaking his head, Sirius decided that he needed to find someone who might explain. A perfunctory glance around the tiny room turned up no shoes or slippers, but the floor seemed clean and wasn't too hot or too cold, so he padded out of the room barefoot and went in search of people.

He seemed to be in a single-story building filled with cells like the one he'd been in, build around a courtyard. His wandering finally led him to a pair of wooden sliding doors, at present left open. A neat row of pairs of slippers decorated the side of the door.