Disclaimer: The characters that look familiar to you belong to J. K. Rowling. The ones you cannot find in any of her books are mine. I don't intend to make any money out of this. I'm just having some fun.

The Fall

Falling. That was the first thing Sirius Black remembered when he opened his eyes. He had been falling. For how long? He didn't know. His cousin Bellatrix had hit him with a spell he didn't know, probably one of Voldemort's horrid inventions, and then he had fell through the veil that separated the dead from the leaving, and everything had bone black, blacker than anything he had ever seen before, blacker even than his nightmares while in Azkaban, blacker than his greatest fears while alive. He had been falling for what felt like an eternity, enveloped in an absolute darkness that almost hurt his eyes, all the while thinking of his stupidity for relaxing his concentration to laugh at Bella. That had been indeed a big mistake. And now he was dead. Or wasn't he? He wasn't really sure about it, but he knew one thing: if this was death, then it wasn't at all what he had expected. Nothingness, yes. Hell, yes. Heaven, with James and Lily, yes. But this?

He was laying sprawled somewhere. He looked around, and in the darkness he could feel there were different hues of black. There seemed to be a black surface of some kind under his body, and then, all around him, a much greater darkness. He tried to move, but he realised that he was kind of stuck to the thing under his body. Only his head was able to move, but his arms and legs were certainly trapped somewhere. He turned to look again under himself, and he realised with a shock that the thing that had stopped his falling was turning less and less black by the minute. Now he could see that it wasn't a smooth surface, but rather a series of intertwined threads, like a spider's web. Suddenly he panicked. Surely this couldn't be real, right? Surely there couldn't be monsters in this abyss? Surely there couldn't be something worse than even death itself? He looked around once more, trying to see if there was something moving, maybe a giant spider o something worse, but it seemed he was alone.

The web under him still was changing colour. He looked at it: it was violet. He looked again: it was blue. He went on looking: it was green. And still he looked: it was yellow. And he looked and looked: it was orange. And he looked once more: it was red. It was as if he was on top of a rainbow, the threads changing smoothly from one colour to the next. After a while, the thing supporting him, started to vibrate, it was as if the thing was alive and, right now, shivering. Sirius tried to calm himself. At least things were changing, which meant he wasn't going to spend eternity like that. Or at least he hoped not. And then, suddenly, with a thunderous blast, the web turned white and started to radiate light all around, lighting the darkness that had engulfed Sirius. An ethereal sound filled Sirius head. It was like a chorus of phoenixes singing, like the gentle music of a river's water rushing to the sea, and Sirius felt happy, happier than he had ever been in his life, so happy that he had to cry like a new born child, and when he did, the light and the web disappeared, and the dead wizard found himself still sprawled, not on top of the web though, but on the floor of a room he had never seen before, in front of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

Sandrine didn't know what to do. She had been already asleep, or so she thought, when the dream had started. HER! She hadn't seen her for a very long time. How long had it been anyway? Twelve? Thirteen years? She wasn't sure anymore. Fifteen. Fifteen years had gone by. But she knew she would remember that face for the rest of her life. That had been the woman who had tortured Neville's parents till insanity while she was hidden in a wardrobe with the baby in her arms. Trying to block the screams of Alice and Frank from the baby's ears and keeping him quite all of the time. Trying not to see through the keyhole of the wardrobe what was going on outside, but still being unable to stop herself from looking. And finally, when the bitch had got bored of hearing her victims scream and had realised she wouldn't get anything useful out of them, they had gone. But before leaving, thinking they were alone, the Death Eaters had taken their masks off, and then Sandrine had seen their faces. She didn't care about the men, they had just enjoyed the show. But the woman had been the one to hurt her sister's friends, and she knew that, whatever it took her, one day, she would make that woman pay for what she had done.

But Sandrine wasn't a vengeful person. It wasn't in her nature. So when the Death Eaters that had tortured the Longbottoms were sent to Azkaban, she tried to forget about them and move on with her life. After all, she had been only thirteen then, and her people had had enough troubles of their own back then. Still, she felt that she needed to do two things: first, protect Neville, and second, make sure that, just in the unlikely case that Bellatrix Lestrange was freed some day, nobody would suffer the destiny of the Longbottoms or even worse, get killed by that woman. So when she became and adult by her people's laws and thus was able to use her powers freely, she asked for the honour of becoming Neville's Shava and had performed the ritual to protect Bellatrix's enemies from insanity or death. Much as she would have liked to just nullify Bellatrix's magic, that was something she couldn't do. Well, probably not even the Princesses of the Three Kingdoms could. So she contented herself with doing what she could.

That had been thirteen years ago, and now a man was lying on her bedroom's floor, and she knew who he was, although she had never met him before. She knew just what had happened, because in her dream she had seen Bellatrix making him fall through the veil, and had seen him reach her web, the web she had carefully sewn all those years ago to stop the final fall of the dead without really thinking it possible that it would be put to use one day. And now here he was, alive again, bound to her for eternity, and probably needing some explanations. So she tried to relax, smiled at the nonplussed wizard reassuringly, and said:

"Welcome back to life, Mr. Black. Would you like some coffee?"