Sirius Black and the Drapery of Doom

Sirius sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, unable to figure out where he was or how he had got there. Sounds were swirling around in his head, sounds he recognized. The plaintive wails of a baby -- Harry -- receding with the thunderous roar of his bike ... a sickening crunch as he stepped on James's glasses, his own choked scream as his eyes landed on James's corpse ... whiplike cracks of Hit Wizards Apparating all around him, shouting, closing in....

It felt like drowning.

It was a full minute before a bedroom slowly started to materialize around him, and another before he realized he was just having another goddamned night terror.

He banged his head back on his headboard. His heart was thumping away in his chest at about a million miles an hour. This was what a twelve-year stint in Azkaban did to you. You could get yourself out of its walls, but your mind would never fully escape that place.

Sirius held still, catching his breath and waiting for the adrenaline surge to drain out of him, reminding himself over and over that there was nobody in the room trying to hurt him. Normally he used a bit of Soothing Serum or Oblivious Unction before bedtime to keep the night terrors at bay. How the hell had he forgotten to do that this time? He was usually pretty religious about it.

Sirius glanced absently at the night stand that housed these sweet saviors of sanity and saw resting on it a goblet filled with some reddish concoction. There was a note tucked under this.

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Gone to run some errands, back around dinnertime. Drink this when you wake up, it should stave off the worst of the hangover.

Cheers,

RJL

P.S. -- Dumbledore sends word he intends to stop by HQ later tonight for brief debriefing. Says he won't make it in time for dinner but would appreciate if we save him some dessert.

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Sirius groaned slightly as he finished reading the note. Hangover. That would explain the pounding headache and pronounced nausea he had begun to feel as the aftereffects of the night terror finally ebbed away. These new symptoms he had no doubt earned fair and square, though his memory was a bit fuzzy on how exactly it might have happened.

Well, hopefully Moony's restorative draught would do what Moony said it would do. Sirius gulped it down, making a face at the bitter taste and the Black family crest he noticed etched on the goblet.

Then, with a mild jolt of panic, he snatched up the note again. Dammit -- he'd completely forgotten he was hosting dinner tonight!

Hoping desperately that there weren't already hungry, disgruntled Order members congregating in his kitchen, Sirius lit the room lamps with a quick flick of his wand and checked his watch. Only quarter past five. Good, he thought, breathing a sigh of relief ... still had another hour or two to go....

He managed to haul himself out of bed, yawning deeply and wondering if he would ever have lived down the mortification of failing to feed dinner guests on account of being dead drunk and passed out. Not if Snivelly found out, that was for sure.

The hangover remedy was starting to kick in. Sirius wandered groggily out of the room, onto the landing, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and feeling vaguely disgusting and disgusted with himself.

Surely there were healthier ways he could find to entertain himself indoors if he really wanted to -- Dumbledore had left him a giant book of crossword puzzles he hadn't even touched, for example. So why didn't he? Why was he stuck in this miserable cycle of drinking and moping and sleeping, day after interminable day?

It was embarrassing to think how he must have looked to anyone who stopped by Grimmauld Place once in a while. Weak. Defeated. And the most frustrating part was that some small part of him still knew this wasn't the real him, wasn't who he wanted to be ... knew he was capable of so much more. He didn't break out of prison and spend two years on the run just to come undone while sitting around his parents' house.

Sirius realized that he had been leaning on the banister for several minutes now, staring vacantly at the stairs, and that what he should have been doing instead was going down to the kitchen to start dinner. He told himself he wasn't coming undone. He told himself he wasn't feeling sorry for himself. He told himself, very sternly, to ignore the fact that his whole being ached to go out and do something, anything, to prove that he was not a complete waste of space.

The gloomy lamps that lined the stairwell came to life with another flick of Sirius's wand, and he was just summoning the motivation to go downstairs when he noticed that something across the hall was wrong.

There was a door open, just a crack -- a door he knew he had magically sealed nearly a year ago. The door to Regulus's old room.

Sirius could have sworn he'd ordered Kreacher not to open it. He hadn't wanted it cleaned out -- had even lied to Molly and the kids last summer, telling them that he thought it was infested with Flesh-Eating Slugs and would handle it himself. He didn't know why. He'd never even been tempted to look inside, and had done a pretty good job all year of forgetting it was there.

Sirius made up his mind. Frowning, he strode purposefully to the door, determined to shut and reseal it, and not bother too much about how it had been opened. His hand hesitated on the serpent-headed doorknob though.

Close it ... just close it ... the last thing you need right now is to get all nostalgic about your stupid prat of a brother....

But he opened it anyway, and next moment felt like someone had punched him in the gut.