SIRIUS BLACK. THE man the whole of the wizarding world feared. The man everyone believed to be a cruel murderer that had killed his best friend and several muggles. The pureblood that came from a blood supremacist family that supported the Dark Lord's rise to power. The man who had spent the last thirteen years in the darkest prison known to wizards and witches, rotting away as his name was long forgotten.

Until news of his escape brought an eerie chill of dread over the wizarding world, leaving a grim darkness to spread in the place of hope.

Mothers and father sent their children off to Hogwarts for the school year, believing that they would be safe there under the protection of the only wizard Voldemort truly feared. As locks were clicked into place and cloaked creatures were sent to guard the castle's walls, Sirius Black loomed in the shadows outside.

Soon enough, after several attempts to break into the school, the realization dawned that perhaps Hogwarts wasn't as safe as once thought. The students were not stupid, nor were they powerless. There was a war threatening to surface outside of the walls of their beloved school. A war that had already taken the lives of hundreds and would not stop until it wiped out an entire blood population.

With the haunting face of the man rumored to be a death eater working closely with the Dark Lord plastered onto every newspaper in England, it wasn't long before every witch and wizard, every son and daughter, every mother and father, knew the name of Sirius Black. A danger and a menace to all of society.

But, perhaps, what they didn't know was that before he became the most wanted wizard in the whole of the wizarding world, he was just a teenage boy deeply in love.

Adira Hassan. Her name meant strong, and Sirius Black could not find a better word to describe all that she was. She was the softest whisper heard only when silence was gnawing at your ear. She was the most vibrant scream in the dark, eliciting your worst nightmares. She could either draw you in closer with her warm skin or make you scream out crying in pain.

Sirius Black had experienced both.

He could still remember the way her small body fit against his perfectly. He could still feel the dimples in her back. He could still taste her, as if her lips had been imprinted into his mind, onto his heart. He could still hear her soft laugh ringing in his ears, her whispers brushing his neck in the dark, her sweet voice scolding him for getting her a present on her birthday.

Not a day went by in his thirteen years in prison when he had not thought of her. It seemed almost like it was built into his system, to think of the woman he had loved for years. The woman he had never stopped loving.

It seemed like a lifetime ago now, a different life in which he had spent his days wrapped in Adira Hassan's arms, listening to her enrapturing stories.

Another life, it was. Another life with no worry of the Dark Lord or living a day without his best friends beside him or growing up.

Another life where he had not been falsely accused of murdering his best friend.

After his godson saved him from impending doom, Sirius Black traveled back to 12 Grimmauld Place. The house he had never much considered home. It was a fairly decent hiding place, however.

His days were spent planning out how he could bring back the Order of the Phoenix and how to finally put an end to the war that had started when Tom Riddle was a teenager at Hogwarts. The loneliness sometimes got to be a little too overbearing, so he would walk through the house while rummaging through his old things. He didn't know what he was hoping to find, but he did know there was something out there that he had to get his hands on.

It was one rather cloudy afternoon when he was clearing out some of his father's old work documents. He had stepped outside for a second after hearing a loud honk from a delivery man. He was sure there was nothing in the mailbox attached to his house, but nevertheless, he strode towards the black box and opened it.

Inside, Sirius Black found several unopened envelopes. He took them out, his breathing growing heavy as he ran his fingers along the pretty lettering on the outside of the envelopes. The ink on the paper, the sharp strokes of the letters. It was all so familiar. They were all addressed to him.

And on the corner of each envelope was a stamp of bright red strawberries.